Podcast Ep. 143: Blogging for Lawyers- How to Build Business and Expand Your Reach

In this episode of the Legal Marketing 2.0 Podcast, Guy sits down with Kevin O’Keefe. Kevin O’Keefe is founder & CEO of LexBlog, the leading provider of digital publishing solutions to the world’s largest law firms—and home to the world’s largest legal blogging community. Kevin, a former trial lawyer himself, is one of the key figures who made law blogging what it is today. Kevin joins us today to discuss blogging for lawyers and gives insight into how lawyers can use blogging as a tool for business development.

Podcast Shownotes

1. Can you tell us about LexBlog and the latest there?

With the decline in law reviews and law journal reviews and the amount of content being published on credible law blogs on the rise, there was a clear need for a place where lawyers could have access to that information in order to cite them. While it may not be precedent, it is of value for a judge to read that and see authority in that particular subject explain an issue. So I realized that we could build a blog archive and we started an initiative called the open legal blog archive project backed by LexBlog. After working on it for about the last two months, we now have over half of the two hundred largest firm blogs, and we hope to continue growing those firms from two hundred to five hundred. We plan on moving down to the solo firms through the Bar Association by syndicating their grouping of blogs to build more than one blog that everyone can access. 

2. Do you have any favorite success stories?

There are several stories of different lawyers who used blogs to become extremely successful in their careers, like Peter Mahler, who had extraordinary success with his New York Divorce Law Blog. Jim Walker and his Cruise Law News Blog,  Staci Riodan, and her work in fashion Law, Hilary Brickens fast rise to success after four or five years with Dan Harris and their Cana Law Blog. It really shows what kind of an effect blogs can potentially have on a lawyer’s career.

3. You’ve said that blogging is about more than business development, it’s bigger goals than that. How do you work with lawyers to think beyond just bringing in business?

I would tell them about building their reputation through blogging or reputational relationship business development. It can be difficult to understand at first because starting out, you might think you just need to pay your mortgage. I tell them that it will work, and they would respond with, well I may ask you how do you know, and I would tell them to have faith. However, you learn that with the internet, it becomes much easier to build that reputation, especially when you compare it to how it was prior to the internet. They’ll just have to realize that it takes some time.

4. What kind of information can users expect to learn about in the Blogging for Lawyers course that will be starting later this fall?

I think we put together something with Good2bSocial that gets into the basics of blogging, like what does it mean to blog? What is a good blog post? How to reference other material and build an audience of subscribers that will cause your blog to rank in search engines. I think people will come away with a great understanding of the fundamentals of blogging.

Takeaway

The profound effect that blogging can have on a lawyer can be overlooked due to the amount of time it takes to build a reputation. Still, as Kevin has pointed out, as long as you put in the work and have patience, the return on investment that you can generate through blogs can be substantial as well as personally rewarding.

If you’d like to learn best practices when it comes to blogging at your law firm but don’t know where to begin, enroll in our Blogging for Lawyers Course that covers all the fundamentals of a successful legal blog.