Click here to see full sized version.

Blog years are like dogs years: They don’t correspond to the human lifespan.

I’ve been a legal blogger for a little over two years now, and that makes the product liability litigation blog that I co-author middle-aged. Many other blogs have come and gone since November 2006.

Now that I’m an old hand, I’m asked about one issue repeatedly: Does blogging work? Is blogging a worthwhile business development tool?

I have three reactions to that topic.

First, blogging is both very easy and very hard.

On the one hand, blogging is very easy.

Pick a platform (blogger.com will do). Pick a legal niche. Start typing. Click on “publish.”

Congratulations! You’re a blogger!

On the other hand, blogging is very hard.

To create a successful blog, you must regularly publish interesting new content. “Regularly” means a few times each week. And “interesting new content” means generating a provocative thesis and defending it in an engaging way.

Try to do that for just one month: Write 12 or 15 short articles in a month, and see how you’re holding up. Now imagine being committed to doing that for eternity — or at least until you retire your blog.

If you’re considering blogging, bear in mind the extraordinary effort that is needed to create a site that will attract a large and loyal readership.

My second reaction to whether blogging works is that blogging does, in fact, yield benefits.

Blogging yields many intangible benefits that might not be evident to an outsider. For example, blogging places you at the centre of the universe about which you blog. Complete strangers — your readers — begin to send you ideas, tips, new decisions and the like that keep you remarkably current in your practice area. By blogging about a particular field of law, you become a clearinghouse for information in that field.

Blogging is also fun. If you enjoy writing, it’s a pleasure to create a good post, and it’s fascinating to watch the immediate online reaction to it. People append comments to your post. Other bloggers react to your post. The legal or popular press may pick up your story. You’ll be hypnotized by the ripples emanating from the pebbles that you drop in the blogosphere.

Blogging forces you to stay abreast of your practice area. If you’re going to publish three times a week about a certain field of law, you’ll be required — or is it condemned? — to read many recent decisions and news stories in your field to generate ideas for the blog. Like it or not, you’ll maintain your expertise.

Blogging permits you to influence the public debate. I’ve seen the blogosphere, the popular press and legal academia react to positions that I’ve taken online. I’ve seen ideas that I raised in my blog enacted into federal regulations in the United States. These are tangible benefits of blogging.

Finally, blogging raises both your personal and your law firm’s public profile. As a result of two years of blogging, I’ve appeared on television shows on CNBC, Bloomberg and C-SPAN. I’ve been interviewed by, and quoted in, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and countless regional papers. I’ve been invited to speak at academic symposia, continuing legal education programs and state Bar conventions. A major academic press has approached me about a book deal.

But then there’s the third — and for some people, most important — issue: Does blogging generate new business for lawyers?

The utility of blogging as a business development tool probably varies with the size of a lawyer’s firm and the nature of the lawyer’s practice. Blogging may generate business most effectively for solo practitioners, because blogging lends a lawyer credibility. Additionally, many solo practitioners (such as those who handle personal injury, family law or trusts and estates matters) are marketing to the general public. “Yellow pages” lawyers — those who might be retained by any person on the street — might generate significant business from blogging, because anyone searching for a lawyer online might encounter the blog and retain its host.

Lawyers at small or medium-sized firms might generate business from blogging, because those firms are often willing to accept smaller matters than larger firms, and smaller clients often select counsel in different ways than larger clients do.

Tall-building lawyers are different. Lawyers at large firms, trying to attract large matters, may find that blogging is a less effective business development tool. Although an individual might find a personal bankruptcy lawyer online, it’s unlikely that the general counsel of a Fortune 500 company will go online to select counsel for a billion-dollar international acquisition. Sophisticated clients have many ways to identify counsel, and they’re unlikely to retain strangers who happen to have published provocative blog posts.

That’s not to discount the value of blogging for lawyers at large firms. Blogging surely causes your name to cross the desks of potential clients, and that might cause clients to think of you when they’re retaining counsel.

But clients are far more likely to think of you if they’ve met you, or have an existing relationship with you, than if they’ve merely read your blog posts.

If you have a solo practice or work at a small firm, and you have the time and inclination to publish regularly, then launch a blog. You might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

On the other hand, if you handle large matters at a large firm, don’t expect blogging to generate a rash of new business in the short term. Rather, use blogging as one element of a larger business development strategy, and then wait patiently to see if your efforts bear fruit over time.

Mark Herrmann is a partner resident in the Chicago office of the international law firm Jones Day. He co-hosts the Drug and Device Law Blog (http://druganddevicelaw.blogspot.com). The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily of his clients or firm.