Nearly Half of Legal Blogs Still Alive and Kicking, Blogger Says
A blogger who has tracked 2,300 law blogs since 2000 says nearly half are still alive and kicking, and those that died had a fairly decent life span.
Tom Mighell, who writes the Inter Alia blog, told Lawyers USA that failed legal blogs lasted a respectable average of one year and 10 months. The number of new legal blogs peaked in 2005-2006, and since then there has been a decline in new debuts, he told the newspaper. Mighell is a senior manager at Fios Consulting, a Dallas electronic discovery firm.
Jones Day partner Mark Herrmann, writing for the Drug and Device Law Blog, was more pessimistic, speculating that many legal blogs likely die in less than a year. He became curious about the life expectancy of legal blogs when he noticed that the professors who oversaw Product Liability Prof Blog and the Civil Procedure Prof Blog had apparently given up their blogging duties.
Herrmann conducted his own unscientific survey by plucking six blogs from the blogroll of Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs and checking to see if they are still alive. Three of them were no longer posting.
“Legal blogs don’t last,” Herrmann wrote. “They require a ton of work; they gather readership only slowly over time; and they’re not the gold mine of new business that blogolaters say they are.”
Robert Ambrogi, who blogs at Legal Blog Watch and Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites, told Lawyers USA that many new bloggers don’t realize how much work it takes.
His advice: If you are a new legal blogger, write “under the radar” for several months rather than making a big announcement about your new venture. That way, he said, “You don’t embarrass yourself when you discover you’re really not made for doing this.”
