Law firms take to blogging to share expertise
Photo/Rebecca Goldfine
Verrill Dana lawyers who blog, from left: Katie Gray, Eric Altholz, Misti Munster, Ben Ford and Matt Bahl. Marketing Director Gretchen Johnson is in the foreground.
Verrill Dana, one of Portland's biggest law firms, has just rolled out its latest blog, Banking Law Update, with plans to follow it with a maritime blog and a blog for human resources professionals. These legal blogs are part of the firm's strategy to use social media to connect with existing and would-be clients as well as enhance the firm's reputation. Verrill Dana launched its first blog in 2010 on energy law, following soon after with an employee benefits blog.
Gretchen Johnson, the firm's marketing director, says the blogs are a way to expand Verrill Dana's reach. "We were producing a lot of content, a lot of valuable information, which we were sending out to clients -- like client alerts and presentation materials -- but we found we were only reaching people who already knew us," she says. "We wanted to broaden...our audience and our access."
The Banking Law Update blog targets executives and managers in the financial industry, Johnson says, and the other blogs are written for people working in the marine industry, or the fields of human resources and energy. Verrill Dana's blogs all have their own QR codes as well, and the firm has printed up small cards with the blog's codes to hand out at meetings. The codes can be scanned with a smart phone to easily direct people to the blogs.
Misti Munster, a Verrill Dana associate who edits the employee benefits blog with Eric Altholz, a Verrill Dana partner, says the blogs help position her and her colleagues as "thought leaders" in their fields. Munster says the benefits blog's posts receive between 200 and 600 hits depending on the topic.
Blogs started popping up in some of Portland's law firms a few years ago, and now have become part of lawyers' "established tool kit," says James Matsoukas, marketing director of Pierce Atwood. Pierce Atwood lawyers starting blogging in 2008 and now write four. Preti Flaherty launched its first blog in 2009 and today has three.
Marketing experts in the legal industry say the adoption of blogs signals a shift away from communicating with clients via old-fashioned means, such as newsletters or even emails, in favor of social media. And it's just the beginning, some say. Lisa Meyers, Preti Flaherty's marketing director, says that in the next year, she expects to see growing interest from her firm's attorneys in writing blogs.
"Lawyers have always traditionally put forth their expertise in newsletters," Meyers says. "And we're seeing a gradual move away from those formats to a blog format. It's a quicker turnaround. You'll see some of the more traditional activities blend into blogs."
As it is now, just a handful of lawyers appear to be blogging in earnest. Some blogs are much more active than others. The lawyers who blog say that, more than attracting new clients, blogging is a way for them to do deep research into their practice area. It also doesn't hurt as a way to build their reputations among other attorneys and clients, something younger lawyers, who are also perhaps more comfortable using social media, are particularly interested in, Johnson says.
Munster, who's 31, says, "It's helpful for me. I'm a relatively junior attorney, and it gives me an excuse and an opportunity to look at a set of regulations [and] learn them, and write a piece about them. It's self-educational, if you will."
Catherine Connors, who has written a blog about appellate law for Pierce Atwood since 2008, says attorneys can't count on blogs to attract new clients, and that at best, it's an "indirect marketing tool." Rather, a blog's value lies in its aggregation of knowledge, really as much for the writer as the reader. "That's the key -- you can't do this if you're going to do it for client development. You have to like it to spend a couple hours a week, once or twice a week, writing an entry," she says. "I have to keep abreast of what's going on anyway, and now I have to be more religious about it."
Connors says she also uses the blog as a resume of sorts. "When people are asking for my bona fides, I can say, ‘Hey, look at my blog, you can see what I've written for the last three years.'"
There are those who blog. And then there are those who tweet. Katie Minervino, an associate at Pierce Atwood, last spring began using social media site Twitter to share information about immigration, specifically E-Verify and I-9 compliance. She plans to start a complementary blog soon. "It's very important to my clients to stay on top of which states require E-verify," she says. E-Verify is an online system that allows employers to determine if employees are legally eligible to work in this country.
At this point she has 249 followers, which she says is "small beans compared to the Justin Biebers of the world," but enough for Minervino to have made useful connections. She says business owners, immigrant rights groups, attorneys and others who have an interest in immigration issues are all followers of her Twitter feed.
Like other attorneys using blogs, Minervino says maintaining her Twitter account has strengthened her practice. "I think it has made me a better attorney because I'm that much more aware of what's going on in the field in which I practice," she says. "It's made me much more plugged in and engaged in the immigration debate."
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