I was approached this morning by another lawyer asking if we could cross-post on one another’s blogs. I’d never really considered giving up my monopoly on the soapbox here, but I found myself not at all cool to the idea. The blog started as a personal venture and some Readers are friends and family who like reading about my day-to-day and personal affairs. But mainly I try to focus on things that at least potentially are of interest to a more generalized audience than people who know me personally.
What I don’t want to do, under any circumstances, is commercialize the blog. It is a labor of love and not a business venture. That’s one of the reasons that I write under a pseudonym. I don’t pretend that someone who really, really wanted to couldn’t figure out who I really am. But it would take a little bit of detective work, which is more than the typical consumer looking to hire a lawyer will do. If someone looking to hire a lawyer came across this blog, there is nothing here to directly steer that person to my office. This is as I intend it to be.
The guy who approached me has a different philosophy — the bulk of his blog looked like a series of expertise touts — he and his guest posters describe various legal situations and what the rights and possibilities of people in those situations might be. And they are all identified by their real names and have cross-links to their marketing websites.
I’m familiar with this marketing approach. It is the legal “soft sell.” By being the person who describes a particular area of law, you become the expert in that area. When someone has a problem in that area, they figure, hey, I’ll just hire the expert because he’s already the expert. It’s a very good marketing method, and one that works a public benefit by disseminating knowledge to people who in theory will retain some of what they have read and be better-informed about their rights and about the law.
But it’s marketing, all the same.
So for the record, I’m not opposed to the idea of cross-posting or giving someone else a voice here. That person would have to “get it” in terms of the subjects that the blog addresses and be able to sustain the opinionated-but-respectful-of-disagreement tone I aspire to. That’s kind of an amorphous standard. Many frequent Commenters here would qualify, I suspect. And I think they’d have to be willing to write under a pseudonym (assuming that they do not already do so). But mainly, they’d have to agree to keep marketing materials out of the content.
