• ideablawg (Lisa Silver)
• James Gannon’s IP Blog
• Lee Akazaki: SQP jeunes avocats | new lawyers’ mentorship
• Le droit au silence (Véronique Robert)
• Canadian Cloud Law Blog (David Fraser)
• HST Blog (Michael Welters)
• Collaborative Practice Canada (Rob Harvie)
• Bonn Law Office Blawg
• Personal Bankruptcy Canada Blog
• SnIP/ITs: Insights on Canadian Technology and Intellectual Property Law (McCarthy Tetrault)
• Canadian Tax Law Blog (Lawson Lundell)
• Employment Law Canada (Kieran Moore)
• Art, Ideas and Brands (Kieran Moore)
• Canada Fashion Law (Ashlee Froese)
• Legal Humour Blog (Marcel Strigberger)
• Ontario Insurance Litigation Blog (Miller Thomson LLP)
• Slater Vecchio Connected
• EntrepreneurLaw.ca (Garnet Brooks)
• Lachance on Law (Colin Lachance)
• Bromwich & Smith, Inc. Blog

As always, if you know of any Canadian law blogs we’re missing, please let us know.

You can head on over to Clawbies.ca for all the details, but here’s the short and sweet version of how the awards work:

• Nominate your favourite Canadian law blogs (or US/European ones that follow the Canadian legal blogosphere) by tweeting (#clawbies2011), emailing, or blogging about them (blogging results in an automatic nomination for your own blog) — you don’t have to be Canadian to nominate!
• The judging is done by me, Jordan Furlong, and our newest judge, Simon Fodden
• We’ll be tracking nominations at the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog
• Deadline for nominations is Wednesday December 28th, and the winners will be revealed on New Year’s Eve at www.clawbies.ca

Looking forward to reading your nominations – and hopefully discovering some great new blogs.

• law.arts.culture (Osgoode Hall)
• Canadian Tax Dispute Blog (Pushor Mitchell LLP)
• Simpson Thomas Blog
• Litigation Brief (Hakemi & Company Law Corporation)
• Couture et associés avocats
• Canadian M&A Perspectives (McCarthy Tetrault)
• The Buchanan Ontario Workplace Law Blog
• Canadian Appeals Monitor (McCarthy Tetrault)
• Oatley, Vigmond Personal Injury Lawyers Blog
• Public Law Advocacy (Gordon Scott Campbell)
  
• PrivacySense (Mark Goldstein)
• Devry Smith Frank Blog

As always, if you know of one we’re missing, please let us know.

P.S. The countdown to the CLawBies is on! Who will you nominate for excellence in Canadian law blogging? Keep watching Law Firm Web Strategy and CLawBies.ca for information on how to participate in this year’s Canadian Law Blog Awards.

• OnCorp Direct Blog
• Bowman Law Office Blog (Laura Bowman)
• Blogue juridique Edilex
• CCLA Library Blog (County of Carleton Law Association)
• Bridge Real Estate Investment Advisory Group (Robins Appleby & Taub)
• International & Transnational Criminal Law (Rob Currie)
• Whaley Estate Litigation Blog
• IP Address Blog (Lorraine Fleck)
• Mack’s Criminal Law Blog (Dallas Mack)
• Gaming Counsel (Stuart Hoegner)
  
• Life of a Law Student (UBC Law Students)
• Henry J. Chang’s Trade and Customs Law Blog
• Henry J. Chang’s Canada-US Immigration Blog
• Franchise Law Blog (Nicholas Ramessar)
• Heintzman ADR (Thomas Heintzman)
  
• Ottawa Litigation  (Owen Bourns)
• Sandy’s Cersys Blog (Sandy Milne)
• Thomson, Rogers Blog
• Work in Progress: A Labour and Employment Law Blog (Siskinds LLP)
• Achieving Justice (Hergott Law)
• IPPractice.ca (Alan Macek)
• Canadian Workplace Legal Post (Marino Sveinson)
• Health Law in British North America (Ubaka Ogbogu)

Thanks to everyone who submitted their blogs – if you know of one we’re missing, please let us know. We’re only a few months away from the CLawBies now, so start thinking about which outstanding Canadian law blogs you’d like to nominate this year!

A couple of housekeeping notes from lawblogs.ca: Lately, we’ve had lots of submissions from brand-new blogs with only one or two posts. While we’re always glad to see new additions to the Canadian legal blogosphere, we generally wait until a blog has had regular posts for three months before getting it listed.

Also, a few bloggers have asked why we have this policy when some of the blogs listed on our site haven’t been updated in several months. In answer to this, we try to curate our collection carefully as we add blogs, but once they’re added, we have no control over how frequently they are updated. As we all know, often blogs are started with the best of intentions, but soon fall by the wayside.  We periodically check all the blogs included on lawblogs.ca, and remove any that haven’t been updated in more than a year.

This set of changes, though, seems to have struck a deeper chord. By taking away users’ ability to see their updates in their preferred order, creating a distracting “roll” display of updates in the upper-right-hand corner, adding new and unasked-for features mimicking Google Plus offerings, and other tinkerings, Facebook seems to have uncorked much of the bottled-up irritation its users have been waiting to unleash for some time now.

Does this remotely matter to lawyers? Facebook is not the social media vehicle favoured by most law firms to promote their business, and most lawyers tend to view Facebook as a fun or social application rather than a professional one. (That’s been my approach — Twitter and LinkedIn for business, Facebook for family and friends). And as the cartoon linked above suggests, it’s unlikely that even this fiasco will put a dent in Facebook’s growth or lead to mass account deactiviation.

But this incident does serve as a useful reminder of an important point: third-party social media platforms are both extremely dynamic and completely outside of your control. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and any number of other online platforms are fluid by nature and will always be making changes big and small. You can complain about these changes all you like, but it’s very unlikely you’ll force a rollback to an old version; actual “New Coke” scenarios are vanishingly rare. One of these days, though, some platform could go too far and really trigger a migration, and if it’s a platform in which you’ve invested marketing time and money, you won’t be too happy about that.

This is one of the main reasons we like blogs so much: they’re all yours. You control the format, design, structure, colour scheme, imagery, interactivity and everything else. More importantly, you own and control the content: what you put on Facebook ultimately does not belong to you, and if Facebook fell into a black hole tomorrow, all the data you’ve placed there would disappear with it. If Twitter collapsed next week, all your pithy Tweets would be gone. And so forth. These services are tremendous distribution and amplification tools for your (hopefully blog-based) content, but that’s really all they should be.

Complaining about Facebook is almost as much fun as using it, and the same goes for these other platforms, still in their infancy and trying to achieve the impossible task of pleasing a vast and demanding audience that pays $0 annually in user fees. Enjoy the sideshow; just remember that no third-party platform should command too much of your online marketing attention.

So, without further ado, here’s a sampling of blogs added to the Canadian Law Blogs List over the last couple of months:

• Workplace Wire (Heenan Blaikie LLP)
• BC Distance Family Mediation Blog (Mediate BC)
• Employment Law Blog (Anne Muter – Boughton Law Corporation)
• Canadian Class Actions Law (Stikeman Elliott LLP)
• Canadian Legal History Blog (Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History)
• David Barristers – Family Law (David Barristers Professional Corporation)
• Canadian Communications Law (Stikeman Elliott LLP)
• Rekha McNutt (Caron & Partners LLP)
• Canadian Employement & Pension Law (Stikeman Elliott LLP)
• Cassels Brock & Blogwell (Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP)
• The Disclosure Blog (Michael Smitiuch – Smitiuch Injury Law)

From lawyers to law profs to students, from Aboriginal Law to Wills and Estates, and from BC to Newfoundland & Labrador, Canadian law blogs cover an immense range of topics, and we’re very proud to provide a web space that organizes them.

As always, if you know of one we’ve missed, please use the LawBlogs.ca submission form to let us know about it.

Likewise, whether you use social media, and which types you employ if you do, is less important than the quality of the content you’re delivering through them. For me, this is the Achilles’ heel of most law firm social media efforts: content is the central feature of social media, and lawyers, as a general rule, aren’t very good at content.

Obviously I don’t mean that lawyers provide poor or mistaken information about the law, which is rarely the case. But “content,” as we use the term in this context, is more than “just the facts,” the bare, need-to-know essentials. The thing about content is that it needs to be read by people. And people read content for more than just the facts.

Take a moment and reflect: why do you read content, personally? What makes you pick up and continue reading a story in a newspaper or magazine or book? Chances are, it’s because the content is:

• accurate
• relevant
• reliable
• concise
• well-written
• engaging
• enjoyable
• funny
• memorable

As you go down that list, the chances that a piece of lawyer-written content will satisfy one of those criteria steadily diminishes. There are two reasons for this. One is that lawyers tend to be painstakingly utilitarian writers — probably because we also tend to be painstakingly utilitarian people.

The other, more important reason is that many lawyers don’t really believe content has much worth beyond its factual value. Lawyers don’t try to write enjoyably or memorably because they don’t see how it matters. Who cares if it’s engaging or not? I’m not paid to be engaging. I’m paid to be right.

Good content has narrative, a story to tell — but lawyers tend to distrust narrative. To lawyers, narrative feels unprofessional, because it’s not stiff and formal and proper enough. Narrative is risky, because it allows for the possibility of interpretation, and lawyers want only one type of interpretation, their own. Most of all, narrative is wasteful: it consumes otherwise billable time in an effort to connect with a reader whose reading experience is not really a priority.

I’m a big supporter of blogging for lawyers, but I’m not a big supporter of a lot of content I see on lawyers’ blogs. I see case summaries that are 90% recitation of the facts and law and 10% general advice to the reader. I see 1,000-word expositions on the evolution of a legal concept that’s irrelevant to a client’s daily life. I see detached and passive writing that goes out of its way to avoid a personal touch. And I still see uncomfortably self-serving copy that seems to have gotten lost on its way to an advertorial. Double all this for content that gets amplified through Twitter and LinkedIn and so forth.

You can see this general disrespect for content in the way law firms budget for content: they don’t. As a rule, I find law firms interesting in direct proportion to the number of non-lawyer professionals they rely upon. Even smaller and midsize firms have a sort of “chief of staff” position; as the firms get bigger, you’ll see technology people and eventually marketing people too. But content professionals? Very few and far between. “Our lawyers can create content,” partners say. And indeed lawyers can. They can type their own correspondence too, but few of them do.

Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog suggests that one way for law firms to get serious about content is to hire independent journalists — real, actual journalists, not just copywriters — to build up a respected and authoritative body of professionally produced content to enhance the firm’s reputation in its chosen fields. As both a lawyer by training and a former journalist by trade, I love this idea, and I wish that some firms would try it.

But I suspect that very few will. Journalists and lawyers are pretty much Mars and Venus in terms of compatible outlooks. Journalists, for instance, are trained to be fair and to look at both sides of a story; lawyers advocating for their clients’ interests (or their own) have no time for that sort of thing. A journalist at an average law firm would last as long as it takes the journalist to make a complimentary reference about a leading lawyer who happens to be the hated rival of the firm’s top rainmaker.

Law firms that want to successfully connect with their audiences have to get serious about content. They have to respect content as something that needs to be readable, trustworthy, and at least halfway fair for it to be of real value to the reader. There are ways in which they can do this:

Budget for content. I’ve written before about how ghostblogging is a short road to a bad ending, but not all law firm content needs to be lawyer-authored. Non-lawyers can and should produce content under a law firm banner, so long as they’re duly recognized as content professionals supporting the work of the lawyers.

Recruit lawyers for content. Law firms maintain “research lawyers” whose job is partly to practise law but primarily to provide compelling legal research. There’s no reason firms can’t similarly identify lawyers whose strengths lie with the written word more than with making rain. Lawyers who write well are rare, but demand for this asset is rarer still.

Stand up for content. The more distinctive and engaging the content, the more risk attends its circulation. Inevitably, sooner rather than later, a firm that concentrates on an innovative, differentiated approach to content will stumble and make a mistake, maybe a big one. The firm needs to be unstinting in support of the content provider, lawyer or otherwise, or it will revert to its bad old habits.

Remember the reader of content. Any serious law firm effort to leverage content has to start with understanding who the firm’s audience is and what they care about. Smart law firms will quickly figure out that their audience is diverse and its preferences even more so; but if massive international media companies can gauge all their specific mini-audiences, I’m pretty sure a law firm can do the same. And here’s a hint in advance: your clients want to read well-written, enjoyable copy.

Invest wisely in good content, and it will reward your firm in a host of ways. High-quality, engaging, memorable law firm content is a very scarce resource right now; see what you can do about cornering this market at your firm.

I thought I’d add a few quick thoughts to the points I raised in the PracticeLink article:

• Once you’ve established a new-media presence — and that can be as simple as a good website with solid content or as bells-and-whistles as a regularly updated blog and constant Twitter stream — don’t be shy about bringing that to the attention of the writers or the periodicals whose coverage you’re seeking. Reporters do read blogs and Twitter feeds, but you don’t have to wait to be discovered like a starlet at a Hollywood soda fountain: drop them a line with links to let them know this resource is available to them and that you’d be happy to assist them with their stories. Your work can speak for itself from that point.
• Occasionally, I hear lawyers complaining that bloggers who get quoted in the news aren’t the “best” or most informed lawyers on a subject, and that reporters should do a better job hunting down the legal profession’s leading lights rather than defaulting to the easy blogger quote. To which I say: waiting for journalists to climb your mountain and seek out your wisdom will exercise your patience but accomplish little else. If you think lesser lawyers are out there blogging, go out there and start a blog yourself to prove your superiority. Maybe those bloggers know more about the law than you’d care to admit.
• If and when you do attract the attention of a media representative, the old rules of dealing with reporters still apply: return calls as quickly as you can, ascertain the journalist’s deadlines and whether you can realistically meet them, determine in advance the thrust of the reporter’s story and if possible the nature of the questions she plans to ask, and, above all: unless you have an extremely solid relationship with the journalist, remember that there’s no such thing as “off the record.” Respect for the other’s professionalism is a given, but trust is earned over time.

Share your thoughts here about the PracticeLink article — do you have experiences linking old and/or new media to relate?

The principle is that the only reliable way for a law firm to build a lasting positive presence on the web is through the steady and timely production of relevant content: no amount of SEO gamesmanship will outperform good content that builds links with other websites. The theory is that law firms are filled with expert content producers who collectively can generate a tremendous amount of knowledge to fill the growing number of available vehicles (web pages, newsletters, blogs, Twitter, and so forth). The reality is that this is often more difficult to achieve than it sounds.

I’ve spoken with a few law firms recently about ways in which Stem can help them promote their presence online, and on each occasion, I’ve brought up the critical importance of content. What I’ve often heard back is that lawyers are surprisingly (to me, anyway) reluctant to commit to content contribution. It might be that such efforts are unbillable and therefore unattractive to busy lawyers under pressure to produce revenue. It might be that the firm has failed to sufficiently motivate and prioritize lawyer content production. Or it might simply be that lawyers want to practise law and leave the content to non-lawyer staff.

But whatever the reason, this reluctance constitutes a major roadblock to firms’ chances of using the web to successfully promote themselves. I’ve read a lot lately about how law firms are poised to essentially become legal publishers, and it’s certainly true that the potential is there. But it seems to be the rare firm whose lawyers are both willing to regularly produce content and are able to ensure that content is readable, compelling and engaging. This is more than a minor annoyance; this is a fundamental challenge to the execution of a marketing strategy.

It’s not hopeless, however. If this sounds like your firm, there are ways out of this bind. Here are a few measures you might consider.

1. Help lawyers prioritize content production. No outside consultant is going to successfully motivate your lawyers that producing content is a good thing; politically and culturally, this message can only be delivered by colleagues. How should the message be packaged?

• Evangelize the benefits of content for increased prestige and prominence — if some lawyers aren’t yet sold on content’s virtues, show them how their competitors get attention and influence from content and encourage them to become “thought leaders” in their areas.
• Ensure that senior or influential lawyers lead by example — you need champions (a managing partner, a practice group leader, a rising rainmaker) who consistently produce articles for a newsletter or posts for a blog to set the tone (and create expectations) for others.
• Create financial and career advancement incentives for content production — if your firm doesn’t recognize non-billable contributions to marketing efforts, change that now. Offer weekend getaway packages for the most prolific authors. Make it cool to produce content.
• Remove the hassle and complications of content production –  create editorial schedules that call for a lawyer to write every second Wednesday, or what have you. Assign “beats” or specific topics to lawyers. Make it easy and quick for lawyers to produce content.

2. Bring in professional content assistance. Even lawyers who’ve drunk the kool-aid and are ready to write will need help organizing their thoughts and creating client-focused content. And virtually every lawyer, enthusiastic contributor or not, will need editing help to turn typical lawyer prose into something that clients would willingly read. On this point, I echo the advice of Dion Algeri at The Great Jakes Blog: hire a director of content,

a full-time employee who can help attorneys take dry legal thinking and turn it into compelling, readable stories that will attract a loyal following.  Perhaps this person has a background as the editor of a magazine or trade publication. … [S]ocial media tools and tactics are relatively easy to learn.  In my opinion, the tough part is creating the kind of content that will rise above the clutter and help build the reputations of your attorneys.

At the very least, you should engage professional editors who can chart the content mandate, help guide lawyers’ contributions, edit the content (or in some cases, interview the lawyers and write it themselves), and package it in a readable fashion. Just make sure, however, that the lawyers are the source of the content: don’t let them delegate the choice of topics or the expression of opinions to staff. That leads us to a third, related point:

3. Approach social media with caution. From time to time, I’ve been asked (indirectly and otherwise) if in addition to advising law firms on blogging strategies and recommending an editorial direction, I would also be prepared to write the blog entries themselves. My response is always the same: I’m happy to review a draft post or brainstorm ideas, but the whole point of a blog post is that it’s personal and authentic. What is published under your name and your photo must come from you. Avoid “ghostblogging” in the law unless sincerity and trustworthiness aren’t important reputational assets to you.

This position rapidly bumps up against the problem of lawyer reluctance to produce content. Is it better to have a law firm’s blog posts composed by a professional writer under the lawyer’s name, or to have no blog at all? I’m a huge believer in law firm blogs, but not at the cost of the blog’s claim to authenticity. If your firm really can’t persuade lawyers to contribute their own content without having it basically written for them, then blogs are probably not for you.

E-newsletters, sure: articles don’t even need bylines, and they can be professionally written with a lawyer’s input. Twitter feeds under the firm’s logo (but not under a lawyer’s name and photo) can and probably should be manned by professional communications staff; ditto a Facebook page. But blogs are a different animal. Bring in all the help you need to make a law firm or practice group blog timely, engaging and must-read. But the author and the voice of the blog must be the lawyer or lawyers behind it, or else all the relationship-, reputation-, and profile-enhancing aspects of blogging will be wasted, or worse.

Make no mistake: your law firm needs lawyer-generated content if it hopes to compete for attention and respect on the Web. So if your lawyers don’t think content matters, if they don’t have the right incentives to produce it, or if they think it’s something they can delegate to a staff person and forget about, you need to correct those misperceptions, and fast.

Steve and I are both honoured to be part of the advisory board of an innovative and timely new resource for the legal community. Attorney At Work is the brainchild of Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, Joan Feldman and Mark Feldman, familiar to many from the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section (and its Law Practice magazine), the Legal Marketing Association and the College of Law Practice Management. They’ve assembled a terrific new resource that promises to deliver, free of charge, “one really good idea every day.” Here’s how they explain Attorney At Work’s value proposition:

Our goal is to give you everything you need to create a law practice — and a life — you can love. Each morning, we send you a sound idea on anything from getting clients — even if you are missing the rainmaker gene, to solving the ‘slammed with work but chronically short on cash’ dilemma. From how to get a grip on cloud computing and the newest apps, to what to do about an assistant with memory problems, or a secretary who doesn’t like you. Our experts help you navigate firm red tape, move up the ladder, launch a new practice or even scale it back for parenthood, retirement or just a little more pleasure in your life.

It’s really as simple as that: sign up for a free subscription and get one brief but illuminating insight, every single day, into how to upgrade the quality of your law work and your law life. My first contribution borrowed from Sean Connery and The Untouchables for a practice management lesson, while Steve’s initial entry focused on the benefits of adding an RSS reader to your daily life. Among the other new articles available through the “Daily Dispatch” are items on how to delegate work successfully, how to dig yourself out from business card buildup, and how to achieve holiday cheer on a tight budget.

The other members of Attorney At Work’s advisory board make you hope you judge us by the company we keep! AAW will be advised by Burgess Allison, Bob Ambrogi, Burkey Belser, Simon Chester, Mark Greene, Vedia Jones-Richardson, Susan Manch, Tom Mighell, Dan Pinnington, Gerry Riskin, Sally Schmidt and Ron Staudt. With advisors and contributors like these, you’re guaranteed to get value from this new service. Sign up as a subscriber today and get one really good idea every day from Attorney At Work.

First, the final touches have been applied and we’re opening up the new Lawblogs.ca.  We’re calling the next two months our beta period, and it comes with a requisite survey for feedback.  We’ve also added a custom submission form, so bloggers can both add a new blog or help classify their current listing.

Next, we’re formally opening the 2010 Clawbies season! Jordan Furlong and I will announce winners again on New Year’s Eve, but as we state so nicely every year:  the nominations are where it’s at! So please support your peers; as Canadian law bloggers so often do.

For the newcomers, our humble Canadian nomination procedure is described in detail on the clawbies.ca website.

And finally, we have a new website to show!  A URL shortening service at Lawlks.ca.  We’ve dropped a consonant in the middle, and we’re affectionately calling it: Law Likes . The idea is to track which Canadian legal content pieces are getting shared, and we’ve started by building it into the Twitter & Facebook buttons on the new Lawblogs.ca.  It’s open for others to use in the legal community, but the primarily purpose at this point is to track lawblogs.ca sharing.

Happy holidays everyone! And happy blogging!

• Ontario (100)
• British Columbia (53)
• National (22)
• Quebec (18)
• Alberta (17)
• Nova Scotia (9)
• Manitoba (7)
• Newfoundland & Labrador (2)
• Prince Edward Island (1)
• Saskatchewan (1)

Of the 240 blogs we list, 63 percent now originate from either Ontario or British Columbia.  Lopsided? Yes, but not surprising. Especially if we consider that up until about three years ago, that percentage was probably well above 80%. The spike of new blogs from the Maritime and Prairie provinces is also a growing trend. Prior to 2009, we couldn’t have counted more than a handful of blogs from either region.

If we exclude BC, Ontario and the National firms and look at the second tier, Alberta’s growth seems to have (finally) slowed.  Alberta’s been though a big growth period over the past few years, but that role now seems to have been passed to Quebec.  If we also consider that our list likely under-represents French language law blogs, Quebec now seems pretty solid in the number three spot.

I don’t have the current growth numbers, but anecdotally can say that the number of law blog submissions we receive continues to rise.  In fact, 2010 may be the biggest growth year we’ve had since starting the list back in 2005.  Social media may be “all the craze” these days, but if the rate of new blog launches is any indication, legal blogs are mirroring a similar growth period.

Finally, I’d like to say that I really hope these numbers continue. The alternative could be consuming our legal web-commentary in 140-character sound bites.  And as much as I like Twitter, a social web without blogs would be a huge step backward.

An important piece of context here: Kevin’s most recent post refers specifically to larger firms’ blogs.  I’m also assuming that he’s referring to firms that develop multiple practice area blogs and position those blogs as subdirectories (or subdomains) under the firm’s principal website.

Does this make sense? Mostly, yes; and because Kevin is addressing the larger firm scenario, I’ll agree with him.  But before I give you the pros of putting a law firm blog on its own domain, let’s explore the counter-arguments, some of which are valid:

1. Blogs on the firm website help generate domain trust. This can help SEO on a site-wide basis, including producing better rankings for practice group pages, lawyer profiles and other genres of firm publishing.  Blogs also draw deep links, which can be another sign of domain authority, and help inspire a more thorough indexing of your website by the search engines.
2. If the subject of the blog and of the website are closely aligned, it might make sense to consolidate your efforts. Consider the case of boutique practices, or solos and small firms with limited practice areas. Our SEO goal is to help Google understand each domain; making clear the core set of keywords, phrases and topics that each website covers. Larger firms’ websites and blogs are rarely this closely aligned, but boutiques, solos and small firms can be. When firm services and blogs are targeting a similar core set of keywords, it might not make sense to split your SEO footprint.

While these are both good arguments, neither is enough to sway me with respect to larger law firms.  Domain trust for firms with more than 30 lawyers invariably isn’t much of an issue.  Moreover, law firm domain names rarely gain enough subject authority to compete in the search rankings with niche-subject blogs. In almost every circumstance, I recommend that firms place each of their blogs on its own unique domain.

Here are the arguments in favour of separate blog domains from the SEO side:

1. The absence of subject-aligned keywords embedded within the firm’s domain name hurts SEO. Like it or not, PetersononBrainInjury.com — all other factors being the same — will outperform PetersonLLP.com.
2. The firm website is about the firm, as it should be. With multiple areas of practice, a law firm website’s incoming link text and other on-page factors can become so scattered that Google has trouble giving weight to the firm domain on any particular subject. Keeping a tight focus is a critical part of competitive SEO.  That doesn’t mean that a practice page can’t compete in the rankings if we focus on the task; but for a law blog that wants to become a topical powerhouse, a single-subject and focused domain will outperform the firm website every time.
3. Law firms websites’ link networks tend to be unfocused. Having a strong set of links (both incoming and outgoing) to similar subject websites is another measure of subject authority and relevance.  Blog links have this attribute in spades, while firm websites rarely do.
4. Links from practice blogs actually support the firm’s website. Strategically linking from blogs back to the sponsoring firm’s practice pages can help your SEO.  But doing that from inside the firm website does not have the same impact.  Blogs on their own domain have their own status with Google, including PageRank, a different set of incoming links, different signals of subject relevance, and so on. It might be an investment to develop the online presence for another domain name, but this is a question of building assets. Long term thinking says having two (or 22) strong website assets is better than having one.

And here are a couple more arguments from a simple common sense perspective:

1. You must let your blogs and your bloggers shine. Let’s face it: burying five or ten blogs within the firm website often means just repackaging the firm’s newsletter content. Simply calling such repackaged content a “blog” doesn’t make it one. There must be a change in how lawyers approach their writing; the lack of personal opinion on a blog can kill its chance of success.  Putting blogs under the firm website risks stifling the personality of the website and of the lawyers who are blogging.
2. Mixing commercial and non-commercial commentary runs several risks.  Blogs on a firm website will always appear tied into the commercial entity of the firm. This becomes not just an issue of optics, raising the question of whether bloggers are restricted from offering value-added opinion. It also runs an ethical risk: changing the nature of the firm’s content and tone with an internal blog may draw unwanted attention of some state ethics panels.
3. A separate blog domain will have a better chance of building readership. Developing a blog’s readership is difficult at the best of times and will be more difficult within the confines of a firm website. A unique and memorable domain is a big marketing plus for any website, no less so for law firm blogs. Blogs on law firm websites don’t have that feature. Law firm website developers also tend to embed these blogs into their larger CMS product, frequently omitting the RSS feed and email alerts in the process. All of which is to say, blogging technology rarely gets utilized in a way that lets these blogs fully interact within the blogging community.

Are there circumstances when a law firm blog can exist within the structure of a law firm’s website? Sure, but invariably, that scenario is not for firms with hundreds of lawyers and multiple practice groups. For reasons of SEO effectiveness, but even more importantly, for the sake of the blog itself, firms should park it on the driveway and not in the garage.

For the generations of lawyers who’ve spent the better portion of their lives absorbing marketing and advertising, especially via unidirectional channels such as television, there’s a real need to disconnect from that experience.  Those who grasp the concept of “paying it forward” early (think altruism, educating, and connecting) will most often develop a large and mature network of web-based relationships. Those that don’t…  are destined to invest hours into the tools, and gain little traction.

Point being? If you’re not obtaining new relationships with your web marketing efforts, it may be time to work a little harder on ‘outreach’; and ease off on the frequency (and intensity) of your marketing message.  Relationships are the number one objective for your marketing success online; which brings me to the second central message of the column, SEO without spam.

Great SEO is dependent on these relationships, especially relationships with other online publishers. Let me spell it out in SEO terms:

• a large social network translates into reciprocal linking (linking to and from others in your online social circle) ;
• that network of links will grow in size boosting your link popularity (Google PageRank, and the like);
• link networks are not only valuable when in sizable number, but also in terms of domain diversity (not the same people always linking in – new relationships help shape this diversity);
• websites that link in based on similar topic coverage are better aligned and authentic (also valued by the search engines);
• similar subject websites also generate links within the body of the page’s text (valued more by the search engines, compared to blogroll links or footer links).

Websites that are really great performers in the search engines – call it ‘link juice’, call it what you will,  have this kind of link network behind them. On-page SEO tactics aside, the real “silver bullet” to SEO rankings is relationships.  Kill those, and you kill your SEO potential.

Unsolicited (or unexpected) commercial messages (a.k.a. spam) kills marketing – good SEO & credibility are just the first casualties. Fortunately the answer is very simple: hang out your shingle and do your business on your website. If your web travels take you elsewhere…  be yourself, be professional, and leave the salesman at home.