General counsel out there, think of blog posts as a way to spread your gospel! I volunteer to publicize the specific messages of any general counsel. Even more, if you mention specific firms, either with praise or with scorn, those firms will prick up their ears and hear your message in a way far more effective than print.
Here is a striking example. At 11:00 AM yesterday I published a post about a ranking of US corporate law firms (See my post of June 17, 2009: 240 general counsel rate leading corporate law firms.). I observed that sheer numbers of lawyers help catapult firms to the top of such lists, simply because many general counsel have either retained them or heard of them. In passing I mentioned that Wachtell Lipton was much the smallest of the group of 20 behemoths, to its credit.
Wachtell monitors references to itself on the Internet, including blogs, and someone must have picked up my reference, visited my site and read the post. Whoever first read what I posted circulated something about it inside Wachtell and invited the lawyers, paralegals and staff of the firm to click on the URL and read the full post. They did, in droves.
Between that first visitor, fourteen minutes after I posted – fourteen minutes! – and the last one, at 9:48 PM last night, 106 people from Wachtell’s main page came aboard (I cannot know anything more than that they came from the firm’s main page.). A law firm with slightly more than 200 lawyers generated in less than a day 106 hits on a blog!
This one example demonstrates that firms pay attention to blogosphere comments, can act quickly to share internally what is relevant, and lawyers and staff pay attention if they find out, meaning they are comfortable with blogs. The blog medium can be fast, pointed, and on target.