Stuart Kaplow is a pioneer and prominent voice in his field, dubbed the “godfather of green building law.” He is also a highly successful legal blogger, and he climbs the highest mountains in the world on the side. LexBlog’s Bob Ambrogi sat down with him, the author of the Green Building Law Update, to gather some insight for This Week in Legal Blogging.
Here’s the full episode and, down below, we have a selection of the best exchanges.
What exactly is green building law? What is the nature of the practice? What are you doing in that area?
A great question and it’s interesting, when I got into this in the 1990s, and I did my first pitch about green building law to a real estate development company, the owner of the company actually looked at me and said “so you want me to paint all my buildings green?” So no, fortunately, that’s not all that we do; it really is a variety of environmentally sustainable practices associated with real estate. So many of those things that involve using less resources, using less energy, water quality, indoor air quality, less waste, all of those things have come together to encompass what my building was. I could spend many hours giving a history of sort sustainable building,but most of it grew out of the late 1970s early 1980s environmental movement, both being concerned about that the built environment had not only on the greater planet but also on the inhabitants, the occupants inside the buildings.
What are the legal issues around that? How is that a legal issue as opposed to an architectural issue or an engineering issue?
It’s an interesting confluence of all of that, of architectural and engineering. I hate to sound crass about this but among the most expensive things an individual does is buy the home they live in and among the most expensive things a business does is occupy or buy the space that it occupies. So issues around that building; if you want a green building, you’re a dentist, a journalist, it’s unlikely that you’re going to know how to specify, instruct, and otherwise erect a green building. So in its simplest form, someone’s got to put together those words to describe what green building is then articulate it in a set of contracts so maybe an architect or engineer could design it, then so a construction company can build it then so it can be occupied by tenants. It’s simplest form, there’s legal work all along the organized stretch on the real estate side, least of the environmental.
How do you fit blogging into your routine between practicing law and keeping up with topics in your field?
My goal is always that I have an identified topic by Thursday. I start on Thursday in case I need to reach out to folks on Friday to gather more information. Then I can further write and edit over the weekend. The topics are generally work that we’re doing. I tell folks all the time, you want to write a diary, go buy a diary and write in your bed at night. This is business; we write to get work, we write to advance clients’ interests, we write to advance what we perceive as correct thinking, environmental law, and the topics we write about tend to be things that are in the office at any given time.
And by in the office, do you mean you directly writing about matters that you’re handling or that they are topics that relate to clients you represent?
Well it’s an interesting question, and I’d say all of the above…we very often write to advance a client’s perspective or point of view on a matter. We have a regular line in our engagement letter, where one of the services we offer clients is we’ll write an article for them. And very often we post on the blog, sometimes for a particular purpose, send it out to a number of people; otherwise views then come down. Sometimes, it stays on the website. Often, I hear often attorneys say they’re reluctant to write about matters that involve their clients. For at least a quarter of our blogs, I didn’t choose the topic, it’s a matter that the client has.
Are there other lessons like that you’ve learned over the years about blogging, about writing a blog, or about how to position it to your audience?
One of the lessons that I was taught early on that I would pass along is about this whole idea of the metrics and the whole idea of looking at the number of subscribers you have to email. I’m sure that would be of some interest to some folks, and it may have some merit, but it bears little if any relationship to what we do. I would urge folks to write to their target. Again, I have folks who laugh at me all the time because I print on paper and mail 7 blog posts a week including to one of my longest standing clients, who’s a self-made billionaire who is very involved in the environmental field, does a tremendous amount of work and paid me a large sum of money to do an awful lot of work over 30 years. And he doesn’t really care to read things on the screen. And I’m pleased to print and put in an envelope, every Monday morning, a copy of the blog for him. Again, we have seven that we send a first class snail mail copy to. We also have a lot of businesses that for security reasons or other reasons, they don’t want to allow, their internal newsletters don’t link to the internet, we physically email it to them, they put it in their internal email. I know some of the larger architectural, engineering and other firms in the country put out email newsletters that way. So again, worrying about the metrics and worrying about that stuff that appears online, not all that important to me. Again, getting it to the right people.
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