When I was in college, my layout and design class was the first to switch to Adobe and away from old-school pagination. We got high-speed Internet in the dorms at The Ohio State University in 2000 (about the same time OSU went to court to formalize that ‘The’ in its name). We were cutting edge, and among the first places in Ohio to have it (high-speed Internet, not Proper articles of grammar).
During my first year at my first newspaper job — Mansfield News Journal — we got our first website. So you can say I started working in newspapers before they had websites, if only by a changing of the seasons.
Old-school newspaper paste-up pagination to Adobe, dial-up Internet to smartphones, yellow pages to a robust Internet marketing strategy being vital to the success of law firms large and small.
A dozen years, give or take.
I’ve now been writing legal blogs since 2006, or more than 7 years, which likely dates me as among the oldest law firm website writers still going…and going…
Which brings me to my recent post Evolution of Legal Blogs Continues to Impact SEO, and how what we do today resembles very little of what we were doing in the dark ages of 2009.
Pedestrian safety tips are no longer going to cut the mustard. We made the change several years ago but so many writing legal blogs continue to do the same old thing, while expecting positive results.
It’s the rest of the world that has moved on.
An old associate doing SEO work in Miami called this morning to say as much. He was looking for court cases and other shareable content. He wants what Google wants, which is to provide his client with something worthwhile to say. In some cases, that might include a mainstream health and safety study, or information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And it’s not to say basic safety advice — from Halloween to Fourth of July — is not still a sharable, viable interaction with your audience. But it does mean that telling me a motorist is ACTUALLY 23 times more likely to get into an accident while distracted EACH AND EVERY year, is likely, blessedly, mercifully, dead on arrival.
Today we use Justia US Law, Google News Alerts and other resources to stay abreast on the latest topics of use to our clients and their audience. It’s what we want, it’s what our client wants and it’s what Google wants. Because if you’re going to write, you should first start out by having something to say.
When it comes to hiring professional legal blog writers and website content writers, just look for the 
For legal blog topics, check out our topic roll!
