Celebrate RSS Awareness Day!

Blogging Lawyers Are Still Pretty Rare

Earlier this week, law marketing guru Larry Bodine pointed out that only about 10% of lawyers have blogs. Seeing that figure startled me. I read lots of legal blogs, so I had always been thinking a greater number of my colleagues had joined the blogosphere. Not so, says Larry.

He offers 7 compelling reasons to start a professional blog. I like his reasons and they offer me a reason to continue blogging. Additionally, knowing that, oh, about 90% of about 1 million lawyers in the USA do not currently blog, tells me that there is a large, and still untapped, market for consulting services to develop blawgs. As I said a couple of days ago, I love this Internet!

New Year, New Blog Stuff

It's now 2008 and the year is well underway. Things are already hectic, but manageable so far.

Since we're in a new year, I've made some changes to the blog. Here are the highlights of those changes.

• Changed the blog to a new theme. I like the previous, darker theme, but decided to use something brighter during the winter.
• Added some new pictures in the right-hand column. One is for humor, the other is from one of my bouts and has a link to more photos of the match.
• Added a few links.
• Arranged the links by category. Since this blog is about law, boxing, and blogging, I want to add many links, particularly about law and blogging itself.

I am currently struggling to decide whether to consolidate more material about the law of blogging into this blog. I'm very interested in publishing a blawg about blogging's legal issues, and I have started to do that at Blog Law Guy. I want to have more legal content here, since practicing law, rather than boxing, is how I earn my living. I am also trying to avoid having a lot of blogs on various subjects, because that very quickly becomes a really difficult practice to maintain over a long time.

I haven't resolved this issue yet, so let's just say I'm working on it. For now, dear readers, just sit back and enjoy the blog. :-)

Enhancement to the Blog

After seeing it on many blogs and other sites, I decided to install Snap Shots on this blog. Snap Shots enhances the hyperlinks with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, and can display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.
Should you decide this is not for you, just click the "Options" icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

I will post more topical boxing stuff over the weekend, but this is a enhancement I have considered for a while, so now that I have implemented it, I want to announce it. I hope Snap Shots will make your visits here more enjoyable.

Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a ... Lawyer?

Over at Client Service for Law Firms, Mike Hellum is using the Rumble in the Jungle, the classic 1974 fight between George Foreman and Muhammed Ali in Zaire, as an example for the kind of persistence and stamina needed to follow a client service initiative through to successful completion. Hellum explains how Ali used his rope-a-dope strategy to win the epic contest and compares it to how you can win a client service initiative.

It's a clever analogy and one I'll use to remind myself to hang in there when things are going less than optimally, both in client service and in life generally. I've also added Mike's blog to my feeds aggregator so I can read what he has to say more often.

The Lawyer-boxer-blogger is Now Blogging at JD Bliss

I'm happy to announce that I am now a guest author on the JD Bliss blog. JD Bliss has a simple, focused goal: "to help attorneys leverage their JD [Juris Doctor] degrees into satisfying careers, personal growth, and individual happiness."*

JD Bliss provides information about a wide variety of topics. Too numerous to list here, the various subjects focus on helping lawyers improve their work/life balance, create more satisfying careers for themselves, and grow as whole persons living rich, satisfying lives. The information on the blog also helps law firms to improve attorney retention and motivation.

My inaugural entry on the JD Bliss blog is about five established and experienced big city lawyers who, in the middle of their careers, left very large firms to join small firms or even start their own firm. Please read that blog post to see the success and happiness those attorneys found as they discovered that bigger does not always mean better in the practice of law.

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* For more information about the mission of JD Bliss, see the blog's "About us" page.

101 Blogging Tips

Since, in addition to being a lawyer and a boxer, I am also a blogger, from time to time I'll share some thoughts about blogging and some useful sites, blogs, and books about blogging. Here's the first of those recommendations from your friendly neighborhood lawyer-boxer-blogger.

At his excellent blog about blogging, Bob Walsh, the author of Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them, points us to "101 Steps to Becoming a Better Blogger," posted at lifehack.org. That's a very useful list and I am going to implement many of those suggestions on my blogs, including Lawyer-boxer's Blog.

Also, I highly recommend Bob's book, Clear Blogging. I have not finished reading it yet, but I already reaping benefits from the book's practical content and easy-to-follow guidance. I cited Bob's book in an article I wrote about Internet radio yesterday, and I have used suggestions in the book to help with the blog consulting work I do for some clients. If you're interested in blogging, Clear Blogging will give you tons of useful information in an easy and accessible format.