Bob Ambrogi has announced that he’s completed his sentence at Legal Blog Watch. Bob’s been sharing the writing duties there since before I started, making him the blawger who ignored Simple Justice’s existence longer than any other. Following so soon on the heels of Carolyn Elefant’s “retirement”, I can only speculate that the burden of keeping up with the energy and humor of Bruce Carton, Carolyn’s replacement, was more than Bob could bear. Or it could be keeping up with the hundreds of new blawgs coming on the scene daily.
But over the four years I’ve been doing this, the blogosphere that we set out to cover has exploded like a supernova. When I started, the number of blogs to track was manageable. Now, it could easily be a full-time effort to keep up. My RSS reader shows some 500 feeds I try to follow.
Beyond the sheer number of blogs is the ever-higher bar they set. So many legal blogs produce so much high quality content that it is difficult to know where to begin and where to end in reading them. As the overall content of blogs has improved, so has the competitiveness among bloggers to be first out of the gate on a story — us included. With all this, legal blogging could be a full-time occupation — and in fact it now is for some.
Seriously, while I haven’t always seen eye to eye with Bob, I can well appreciate the burden of trying to keep track of the blawgosphere. There’s a huge difference between writing for fun, which means I can write or not at will, and writing for money, which means Bob had to write upon command. The product may be similar, but the pressure is entirely different.
While Bob will continue to write at his own blogs, Lawsites and Media Law, where Bob really let’s his hair down and sheds the formality that characterized his “official” posts, his years of doing yeoman duty as the Legal Blog Watcher are very much appreciated. After all, without Bob’s help, I might have missed the blawgs that used my posts to come up with their own, which would catch Bob’s eye.
Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy does a rare introspective post about dealing with commenters. After deleting a politically conservative comment, Orin received the anticipated screaming email, but with a twist. This one challenged him for trying to be “too fair” with liberals by being too harsh on conservatives.
While Bob will continue to write at his own blogs, Lawsites and Media Law, where Bob really let’s his hair down and sheds the formality that characterized his “official” posts, his years of doing yeoman duty as the Legal Blog Watcher are very much appreciated. After all, without Bob’s help, I might have missed the blawgs that used my posts to come up with their own, which would catch Bob’s eye.
Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy does a rare introspective post about dealing with commenters. After deleting a politically conservative comment, Orin received the anticipated screaming email, but with a twist. This one challenged him for trying to be “too fair” with liberals by being too harsh on conservatives.
First, I think this is the first time a commenter has criticized my comment moderating on the ground that I am trying to be fair. Normally, those who find their uncivil comment deleted claim that I harbor a bias against the commenter and I am afraid to recognize the deep truth of their message. So this is a bit new, and I appreciate that.
Second, moderating comments can make you feel many things, but one thing it cannot make you feel is deeply loved. The kinds of people who write uncivil comments are the kinds of people who get furious when their comments are deleted. They often write in with very angry responses filled with an unusual number of four-letter words, usually indicating their belief that you have some deep-seated insecurity that is making you not realize how right they are. If you need to feel loved, you don’t generally volunteer to spend your time interacting with that sort of person.
This is a new twist on the rather bizarre experience and “relationship” a blawger has with commenters. While regular readers/commenters form a sort of community at a blawg, day-trippers have this inexplicable disinhibition where they believe that it’s them against the blawger, each having equal “rights” in the exchange. The commenters believe not only that their thoughts, often expressed in a way intended to directly insult the blawger, are as worthy, if not more so, as the blawger’s.
While I can’t say for sure how many readers Orin typically has for a given post, I know it’s far more than I do, and that he will get many more comments at VC than I do here. Yet the single day-tripper truly believes that it’s all about him. Worse still, the day-tripper somehow superimposes his (invariably brilliant) supposition of the blawger’s motives over the situation, thus challenging the blawger’s purposes, ranging from abject stupidity to utter gutlessness, in silencing his critics.
For crying out loud, you don’t know squat, and you haven’t a clue where your brilliant and biting comment fits into the scheme of things. If you think your opinion is the most important one in the world, then start your own blawg and write down every thought that enters your head. If you’re as smart as you think, you’ll be the most influential blawger in the world. But when it comes to someone else’s blawg, don’t be a jerk. Your approval really isn’t the most important thing in a blawger’s world.
Mark Bennett, at his Social Media Tyro blog, explains for the hard-of-thinking why ghostblogging might be a less than honest way to promote yourself. Would you take credit for another lawyer’s court victories? What about putting up a photo of a good looking lawyer instead of your own?
While I can’t say for sure how many readers Orin typically has for a given post, I know it’s far more than I do, and that he will get many more comments at VC than I do here. Yet the single day-tripper truly believes that it’s all about him. Worse still, the day-tripper somehow superimposes his (invariably brilliant) supposition of the blawger’s motives over the situation, thus challenging the blawger’s purposes, ranging from abject stupidity to utter gutlessness, in silencing his critics.
For crying out loud, you don’t know squat, and you haven’t a clue where your brilliant and biting comment fits into the scheme of things. If you think your opinion is the most important one in the world, then start your own blawg and write down every thought that enters your head. If you’re as smart as you think, you’ll be the most influential blawger in the world. But when it comes to someone else’s blawg, don’t be a jerk. Your approval really isn’t the most important thing in a blawger’s world.
Mark Bennett, at his Social Media Tyro blog, explains for the hard-of-thinking why ghostblogging might be a less than honest way to promote yourself. Would you take credit for another lawyer’s court victories? What about putting up a photo of a good looking lawyer instead of your own?
Since you’re still reading this, odds are that you didn’t graduate from a Tier-One law school. You know that it doesn’t make any difference to the results you get (or lease, through GhostWins.com), but some paying clients might be more likely to hire you if your resume were a little more impressive. GhostResume.com can fix that problem. On the same model as GhostWins.com and GhostMug.com, GhostResume.com allows you to contract out your credentials. For a nominal fee, you get to use the guaranteed-to-impress bona fides of an actual lawyer in your marketing materials. Your clients will never know the difference.
There is no end to the opportunities to lie about oneself in the scheme of self-promotion. And hey, if it’s all about making money, and you couldn’t care less what you have to do to score the next case, then why not? Because it would be wrong to claim another lawyer’s victories, or use his photo, or resume.
So how is it okay for a lawyer to hire a ghostwriter to write his blog?
Legal Ghost Blogger, the subject of Bennett’s invective, is an enterprising concept.
LegalGhostBlogger.com will provide you with a steady stream of content for your estate planning blog. Created by an experienced writer and estate planning paralegal, your content can be a mix of syndicated or original posts, with new material appearing on your blog at the intervals you choose. It’s easy and affordable, but above all, it’s highly professional…
The fingers behind the post;
Jenni Buchanan is a writer who has worked in the legal arena since 2002, including the past several years as a paralegal with a prominent estate planning law firm in Southern California. As a writer, Jenni has been published in both the professional and literary fields, and coached others in improving their own writing skills. As a paralegal she has met with clients, drafted trusts and estate plans, and organized seminars. Jenni graduated with a B.A. in English in 1997.I can’t blame Buchanan for trying to make a go of it. She wants to write, and prefers to be paid for it. Who doesn’t? But if you’re inclined to have Jenni write your blog for you, at least use her photo as well. After all, you wouldn’t want to be a total fraud, would you?
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I had no idea that US lawyers were using ghost writers for blogs until I read about this recently via Mark Bennett and your own posts.
Good grief – whatever next?
“I’m sorry… but I am a very busy corporate lawyer… would you please ‘look after’ my girlfriend / wife etc etc?”
Frankly… nothing would surprise me in the world of BIGLaw or City Law (London) these days. I went to a meeting at a London law firm in October last year. The partner was ‘fizzing’…. on cocaine. At 11.00 am ? I was astonished. Thankfully, He was the client, not me.
I’ve seen enough people taking it to recognise the signs straight away. Curiously… lawyers often like to talk slowly for professional reasons and not always to do with clarity.
Full disclosure – I’m kind of a ghost writer for a law firm’s blog (in the credited, “Autobiography by Snoop Dogg and Dan Solomon” sense, not the anonymous, “William Shatner doesn’t actually write those novels” one), so this is a subject that interests me a lot.
On one hand, this is an awful economy for writers, and I can sympathize with her hustle. On the other, I’ve struggled a lot with both making sure that it’s always clear in my work on the firm’s blog that the entries are written by a non-lawyer, and especially with the knowledge gap that comes with writing about very legal issues without the appropriate experience and background. Basically, I don’t want to write something that exposes my own personal ignorance and put it out there as a representation of Sumpter & Gonzalez.
I’ve found what I think is a good balance by using my access to the firm’s attorneys to get their expertise on the site, but it’s still something that I’m very conscious of. Which makes me really nervous when it comes to this lady – for a non-lawyer to represent herself as a lawyer, all ethical concerns aside, she runs an incredibly high risk of representing her clients poorly. She may be a very gifted writer, and have some experience as a paralegal, but there are likely to be things she doesn’t know as well as a lawyer does, and being represented on these attorneys’ sites as the lawyers themselves means that they run a high risk of sounding like they don’t know what they’re talking about at some point.
Bad economy for writers or not, I’d really be too concerned about the damage I could do to a client’s reputation (and, sure, what that’d do to my own future employability) to take that chance, I think.
–d
I can’t blame a writer for trying to write. It’s what they do, even though their lack of knowledge can inadvertantly result in some major and glaring mistakes like this one by Emily Grube, noted at Turk’s New York Personal Injury Law Blog, headlined “Doctor Found Innocent Of Malpractice.”
For obvious reasons, I’m far more concerned (like Bennett) about the fraud perpetrated by lawyers who use ghost writers to blog for them. If a non-lawyer ghost writer screws up a lawyer reputation, then at worst he got what he deserved. But what of potential clients who are misled into believing that the guy writing the blog is the lawyer they’re hiring? Neither honest nor acceptable.