Employment lawyer Tiffani McDonough rewrites the dry employee handbook by including March Madness and what celebrities are wearing on the red carpet in the blog HR Legalist.

Tiffani McDonough“Some of the things that we deal with can be a little more mundane so we try to take a creative approach to it and tie it back into something topical,” said McDonough. “Our goal was to create a dialogue with the labor and employment community.”

McDonough and the other labor relations lawyers at Obermeyer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel have found their way into the human resource conversation by connecting everyday trends and topics to serious employment laws: like if creating a March Madness bracket violates state gambling laws and how employees can have more eyes on them than Oscar-nominated actors based on their outfits.

For HR Legalist, the everyday topics with the serious employment lessons has turned the blog into an online resource for HR professionals but without the legalese.

“Our goal with HR Legalist was to provide an online resource to human resource professionals, business owners and other labor and employment counsel. It’s a way for HR professionals to learn about case law and legislation, as well as best practices for particle workplace, issues such as investigating complaints of workplace harassment issues or discrimination,” said McDonough. “We try to keep the blog in a conversational tone and avoid the legalese in an effort to really engage our reader.”

The blog has only been live since September 2013, but McDonough said that she and the other writers have received positive feedback from readers, who are primarily looking for employment resources. While the majority of readers work in HR or labor relations, small businesses that don’t have their own HR department but looking for general best practices are among their audience.

“It seems like that we’re becoming a trusted online resource,” said McDonough. “It’s also not uncommon to have a reader contact us after seeing a related blog piece because they realize that they have to implement some sort of change in their company.”

McDonough, whose clients range from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, doesn’t believe that the blog being an employment resource means that its giving away free legal advice.

“We’re giving practical tips, but with any labor and employment issue, it’s very factual. Advice on [the Family and Medical Leave Act] is going to be on a case by case basis, and what we’re writing about is the FMLA in general. If there is some particular issue, [readers] are still encouraged to contact some legal counsel even if they read our piece and find that some of their questions have been answered,” said McDonough. “Any legal advice would have to be on a case by case basis, so we’re not concerned with that.”

While not discussing client cases, she does draw on her day-to-day practice for blog post ideas, especially if a number of clients have questions relating to one general topic. She uses that to build the online dialogue but is mindful of what readers want, too.

“If people contact us about the blog, we always ask them what they would like to see on it. People have been very receptive to giving us issues that they would like to see on there. That’s been a huge help for us,” said McDonough.

She credits the success of HR Legalist to writing a combination of what readers want to see, current headlines and cases, and evergreen employment topics – all while committing to publishing a posts at least twice a week.

“It’s not that it’s a set schedule, but just a goal for the week. Sometimes we have pieces that we can put up that aren’t quite as time sensitive. We have those pieces ready to go up. It’s a nice mix of articles,” said McDonough. “We find to keep people engaged, we need to have that commitment to post regularly.”

To McDonough, that’s one of the most important aspects to successful blogging, regardless of the topic:

“If you’re going to start a blog, you have to have a commitment to it. To be successful you need to post regularly. You should also always have a takeaway for the reader. If you’re writing about a particular court decision, be sure to include a best practice or what the reader can learn from that decision.”