An interesting development out of the UK. Clifford Chance has made a very targeted move in sponsoring Conflict of Laws.net. More on the sponsorship here, and here.

Blog sponsorships are nothing new to the online tech community. For examples, we can look to GigaOM or Techcrunch. But in other blogging communities, including law, the idea of sponsorship is quite new. It could be the fact that commercial applications typically lag behind web innovation; that we usually experiment to see if something delivers, readers adopt, and then monetization strategy follows once we’re beyond the proving ground. It may also stem from our aversion to spam and anything directly commercial online. Kevin O’Keefe has said he’s not a fan of ads on blogs and that it cheapens the offering, but I suspect with an appropriate design fit he’d be ok with the sponsorship concept. And depending on the blog, of course.

My next question would be on the strategic fit. A blog on International private law and Clifford Chance? Obviously it’s a good fit, and frankly, they get kudos for being both the first mover, and picking off a desirable audience of global decision makers.

The other value test here, is to question whether the firm could build this property & audience on their own. CC has both the resources and in-house expertise to do so, but may not have been able to make the business case internally. Busy attorneys, a lack of time, and so forth. That’s too bad. I’m a big believer in firms owning web properties, and the associated audience & relationships. This may not get reflected in a traditional ROI equation, but the value is there – new business relationships with targeted decision makers, marketing collateral, search rankings, referral networks – the list is extensive. CC gets some of those things with this move, but it isn’t their audience, and long term I’d rather see those assets under CC management.

Will law blog sponsorships become a trend? Perhaps. I can see firms choosing sponsorship as a springboard to other online strategies, or using it to engage niche target audiences. Firms may also use a strategy that includes both in-house blogs and a network of blog sponsorships — it’s working for ALM, isn’t it? :)

I see a lot of value in blog sponsorship as compared to other forms of web advertising. What many blogs lack in reader volume, they more than make up for with audiences that are focused & clearly defined. Aggregate a series of selected sponsorships together and it could be *very* good advertising. My concern, is that firms will see this as an alternative to blogging themselves. As part of a larger integrated approach, I think it makes a lot of sense. But on its own, firms will remain without a ‘voice’ and excluded from the online conversations within their chosen markets.

Many thanks to Tom Mighell at Inter Alia for making Law Firm Web Strategy his blog of the day.  For those who may not know, Inter Alia is one of the oldest law blogs out there, and the blogs covered in Tom’s BOTD feature reads like a who’s who of the legal blogosphere.

Tom once told me that he lines up the BOTD posts months in advance. So if you’re launching a new law blog, be sure to drop Tom a note early.  It is an institution, after all. :-)

Does the top-down expertise model still fit with our current fixation on the social web? That’s not an exact paraphrase, but an interesting tangent I’ve taken from Rex Hammock’s post today on the NPR’s music site. Rex says:

“…what I like about the new NPR service (and how it “compliments” those other services) is that it pulls together the “wisdom of experts” at some of the last, remaining bastions of full-time, professional musicology: public radio stations.”

This got me thinking in two directions. First, that this was a great illustration of how valuable it can be when a trusted expert recommends something. The web community is all aflutter these days on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, web 2.0, and the democratizing element of (non-techie) individual participation. And for the most part, I’m in the middle of all that. But one thing I’ve often thought missing is a connection to the concept of authority. Web communities enable us to connect and communicate within groups, to discover new people, and find new content. But ultimately, all that discovery needs to lead somewhere. And with time often being a finite commodity, along the way each of us must decide who we trust.

The web offers a lot of innovation these days, but the mileage for recognized ‘experts’ can vary. As an example, let’s compare the pure community approach of Wikipedia, to Cornell’s legal wiki Wex. Both are great sources, but at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to leveraging expertise. While Wikipedia is open to the world, and relies on its massive user community to fact check and create authority, Wex had no illusion of becoming authoritative using the same model. Instead, Wex’s approach of getting experts to apply and qualify themselves before contributing has allowed them to create an equally authoritative tool, albeit on a smaller topic. What Wex lacks in quantity (of contributors), it more than makes up with quality.

My second thought here, is on the opportunity the web affords those who take their expertise in a very narrow direction. In the legal community, there’s a bit of a land grab going on right now. Lots of lawyers setting up blogs, or attempting to digitally carve out their areas of expertise. But what often gets overlooked is how narrow one’s area of practice can possibly go. I look at Bill Marler’s online presence, and have to think we’ve only seen the beginning.

What does all this mean to lawyers? My response would be the same to anyone selling services & branding their authority online. We shouldn’t assume that being an expert has stopped working in a web 2.0 world. Keep looking for ways to expose these individuals (names & faces – same as before) in any website you build, or any community they participate in. By the same notion, don’t assume that being an expert offline will be an easy transition to recreating that same authority on the web. The land-grab mentioned above is still in play, and leading experts everywhere need to be proactive. Finally, expect our codification of expertise to continue to be all over the map — books, papers, blogs, micro-blogging, link-blogging, audio, video — it’s not slowing down any time soon. Manage the ‘mix’ of longer-vs-shorter discourse, and make sure the off-line and on-line elements are working together.