Jordan Furlong of “Law Firm Web Strategy,” points out four bad habits of underachieving legal blogs. His number one complaint is the reliance of legal blogs on case commentary for the vast majority of their blog content.
How to Turn This Around
One of the advantages of writing case commentaries is that judges are constantly writing opinions so there is lots of opportunities to use that content for your own blog. The problem is that blogs aren’t the right forum for that kind of writing. A legal blog should be focused on providing its readers with tips and insight often for a non-legal audience. Trust me, non-lawyers will never read a case comment. And other lawyers can find case commentaries in the Daily Journal and the like.
A different approach is to ask first whether an opinion actually changes the law? If so, how and why should a reader care? Start not with the case but with the issue the case addresses and begin the post with why this opinion is important to the reader. If you can’t figure out why its important, then it not a case worthy of your time.
