Kevin O’Keefe’s post today “Decline in enthusiasm for law blogging? Hogwash” addresses some recent discussion that law blogs have reached their peak. I agree with Kevin that legal blogging is far from peaking, and I thought I might be able to provide a little bit of a Canadian perspective on this.
Legal blogs are in their infancy over here. For the vast majority of lawyers in Vancouver blogs were “too new” and “too untried” for their liking until recently. We do have a small number of legal bloggers out here, such as Lang Michener’s Law of the Land Blog, and Clark Wilson’s Canadian Trademark Blog, but the trend is only just emerging. Just visit Steve Matthews blog roll for the complete list of Canadian law blogs. The number currently stands at about 60 law blogs Canada-wide.
In November 2006 the Legal Marketing Association Vancouver Chapter held a Blogging Panel. The panel provided a group of local lawyers and legal marketers a chance to learn more about how blogs work and to ask a number of questions. The top concerns for the lawyers here were: (1) How much time is it going to take? (2) Does blog content constitute a legal opinion? And in the same vein, (3) how can a lawyer ethically and safely blog on legal topics? The panelists answered these questions most effectively and as a result we are going to have at least two new legal blogs arise from just the small group that attended.
I predict that in the next year, as lawyers and law firms become more comfortable with the medium, we are going to see the emergence of many more legal blogs in Canada, and that this number is going to escalate fast in the next three years.
Let’s not forget, less than ten years ago, many law firms here didn’t even have a web site!
