Photo of Carolyn Elefant by Arnold Adler.
Home: Bethesda, Md.
What she’s been up to: Carolyn Elefant, the woman behind My Shingle, continues to blog about sole-practice life and grow her legal practice.
An energy lawyer who loves trains and travel, Elefant says that today social media influences most—if not all—of her clients in hiring her. And you can find her at Google+, LinkedIn, Vimeo and Twitter, and she also posts practice-specific writing online. One article, “Know Your Rights When an Interstate Pipeline Comes to Your Community,” was linked to by a regulatory agency.
“I find it’s never really one place [that clients come from]. Usually it’s something like someone saw my website and they talked to people who knew me,” Elefant says. “Some of the landowners don’t have a lot of resources to hire an attorney, but they tend to be people who are well-educated and are used to using online tools.”
Happy Anniversary: In December My Shingle celebrated its10th anniversary. The blog thrives, Elefant says, because she enjoys it so much. “It lets off a lot of steam, and you can use it to explore different ideas,” she says.
If you’re considering a blog for business development, Elefant adds, never hire someone else to write it for you.
“That’s counterintuitive, and it sounds like canned content.”
