Maybe blogging isn’t such a good idea for law firms

Hot on the heels of my last post about why lawyers should blog, I came across another post on the LexBlog Blog which looks at reasons why a law firm should steer clear of blogs.  The post references a post on Law.com titled "Is Your Blog Exposing You to Liability" which takes a look at some universal blogging considerations such as:

• the risk of defamation,
• copyright and trademark infringement,
• the effective use of disclaimers, and
• the relevance of the blog to the firm’s business and goals.

These concerns are really concerns which any company should take into account when considering whether to launch public blogs (internal blogs can prove to be pretty effective communication tools when distributed across the firm’s intranet, for example).  It is important to bear in mind that a blog is a form of online publication which can have far reaching effects, both positive and negative because it is accessible to such a huge audience and because copies of your posts are stored all over the place (including search engines which cache old copies of sites and which reproduce those stored copies in search results).

So sure there are reasons not to blog but the risks can be managed.  Ultimately I believe that a blog can be a tremendous communication and conversational tool.  It is just a question how you use it.

Tags: reasons not to blog, blog, blogging, defamation, trademark, copyright infringement, disclaimers, relevance