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Pitblado LLP believes it has found the perfect way to communicate with clients and prospects, showcase its talent and attract new business — all at the same time.

The Winnipeg-based firm recently launched its own blog, PitbLAWg.com, which is dedicated to showcasing activity at the firm, highlighting developments in particular legal areas and positioning the firm as an expert in many areas of business law.

Bruce King, Pitblado’s managing partner, says the blog represents a new element of the firm’s outreach, which traditionally included putting on seminars and presentations and volunteering for different causes.

“This is a modern progression of that. It gives us the opportunity to have a conversation with people who like to receive their communication through social media,” he says.

King says it didn’t take long after the Feb. 1 launch for him to realize what a “phenomenal” tool the firm blog could be. He loves the fact that its lawyers can provide relevant information to clients and potential clients on an extremely timely basis.

“We can talk about new developments in the law, changes in the law, we can provide our insights on topics and we don’t need to wait three months to do it (in a newsletter),” he says.

Topics on PitbLAWg include disputes between condo owners and their boards of directors, Canada’s competition act, whether electronic documents are as valid as originals, partnership agreements and estate planning for your pets.

King says just as daily newspapers filter the countless stories available on newswires each day into the product that arrives on your doorstep every morning, Pitblado’s lawyers have done the same with information available on the Internet.

“We’ve (positioned) ourselves as having that expertise. We’ve done the filtering for you. We’re saying, ‘here’s the information. If you like how we filtered it, hopefully you’ll realize we’ve got a special expertise,’” he says.

Brian Bowman, a lawyer specializing in privacy and access to information law at Pitblado and who is leading its blog initiative, says the firm went to school on Davis LLP, which has been running niche practice area blogs for five years. He says he believes Pitblado is the first in the country to have a dedicated firm blog. (Blogging isn’t new for law firms but the majority of them specialize in particular practice areas or come from individual lawyers.)

He says it’s not surprising that the majority of the firm’s bloggers are young lawyers who are comfortable with cutting-edge technology and social media.

He says traffic has been growing regularly since the launch and just hit 2,500 hits per month, about half of where the firm would like it to be. That’s not bad, Bowman says, considering all the promotion is organic.

“Some people who go on the blog are forwarding posts to others. Rather than having a blog that is only a marketing tool, we want to have valuable content. We’re hoping that content will drive traffic, interest and indirectly, business,” he says.

Bowman says blogs have the potential to start conversations with people that lawyers otherwise wouldn’t be able to meet. That’s good for business.

“I’ve posted topics on my blog which have solicited feedback from people we didn’t even know were reading it. In some cases it has led to presentation requests and in others, is has led to files,” he says.

Bowman, who launched his own blog on privacy issues about a year ago, says posting comments online for the entire world to see comes with its own inherent risks.

“We trust our lawyers to be competent and not defame someone or steal copyright materials,” he says.

Chris Bennett, a Vancouver-based intellectual property and technology lawyer and partner at Davis, says it launched its practice area blogs as a way to communicate with the new media generation.

“Our first blog was a video game law blog which we started because our clients said to us, ‘this is the way everyone in our industry communicates, you might want to consider a blog of your own,’” he says.

The firm now has eight blogs and lawyers in each department are responsible for contributing their own postings. Bennett says the blogs have proven to be extremely beneficial for many reasons, not the least of which is they require lawyers to keep up to speed with what’s going on in their industries because they need to know it back to front before they can make a posting.

“It’s been a good source of business and referrals for us, too. People see our blog postings and they contact us for follow-up work,” he says, noting the blogs have replaced the firm’s e-mail newsletter.

King says the costs of developing and maintaining a site are far from onerous. He says he expects more law firms across the country will follow suit with a firm-dedicated blog in the not-too-distant future.

“Law firms tend to be followers, not leaders, and tend not to be early adopters. But as soon as one law firm has one, other firms say, ‘we have to have one of those,’ ” he says.