Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Telecommuting

Article on Slate about telecommuting, and how the new information technologies have actually increased work-related travel instead of decreasing it.  It's not a groundbreaking piece, but I thought it was interesting and well done.  And it's written by Tim Harford, whose book, The Undercover Economist, I just read last week. 

Law Blogs

Jack Balkin has a really terrific interview about law blogs and blogging posted on his blog.  I just want to quickly flag one thing he writes:

This is the first generation of law students who are going to law school after the rise of the blogosphere. If you went to law school a few years ago, you were totally immersed in the experience of a single law school, and your professors (and the law library) were the main sources of expertise. Now law students can hear legal opinions from law professors and their fellow students around the country-- and around the world-- on almost any topic they desire. The blogosphere becomes part of your legal education. That didn’t really exist before.

That's true, I guess... but is it really true for a significant percentage of the law school population?  Like, what percent of law students read blogs on any sort of regular basis, especially blogs written by professors or students actually blogging about the law?  I was probably as plugged into the blogosphere during law school as anyone, and even though the content is out there, and there are lots of very smart people writing very smart things about all sorts of legal issues, I'm not sure I read enough of it, and thought about enough of it, for it to really make an educational impact.  But maybe there's lots of people taking better advantage than I was.  I don't know.  But I wonder how big the blog-engaged population really is.  I'm sure it's higher among law students than among most segments of the population, but even so -- is it 5%?  10%?  More?  How many people are noticing an educational difference between the time before blogs and now?  I don't have the answer, but I think it's an interesting question.

2007: Some Thoughts About Blogging, and Some Tweaks and Resolutions

(Rome and Florence post -- with pictures -- below.  Just have to scroll a little bit.)

Happy 2007.  I promised some blog changes in a post I wrote before my trip, partly as a way to force me to come up with some.  I feel like I do this a little bit too often in writing-related contexts -- I promise things before I've done them, as a way to force me to actually do them.  I did this constantly throughout the novel writing, promising my publisher things I didn't have, on short deadline, to force them to happen.  Because I can work to deadline, and follow through on commitments.  It's the lack of commitments that doesn't work for me, and keeps me from being productive.

I've been blogging now for about four and a half years, and I'm not sure I remember what it was like not to be doing this.  There's a part of me that thinks I should see what happens if I stop, but I don't actually want to.  I like blogging.  I like the feeling of connection, the accountability I feel to my readers, the way it forces me to think about things to write about, and gives me a place to sort out my thoughts.  I like hearing from readers and meeting new people through this, and feeling like I have a voice.  I like the instant feedback and the idea that I can write something and put it out there into the world.  If anything, I screwed this up in 2006 and want to fix that in 2007.  I haven't written enough, or well enough.  Or pushed myself enough to be funny or thought-provoking or worthwhile as a blogger.  I've forgotten, to some degree, that this medium is powerful.  It got me a book deal. 

There are a handful of blogs I've read for longer than I can remember.  I started thinking about this just a few days ago, but their blogs have done good things for them, in almost every case.  Aaron Gleeman, who writes about baseball, built an audience, got a job with a larger Internet entity (Rotoworld) and now has a job writing for NBCSports.com.  The Amateur Gourmet, who writes about food, got a book deal.  Okay, so maybe it's just those two, or at least that's all I can think of right now, but that's still pretty cool.  To some degree it might be timing like it was for me -- blogs are much more widespread and mainstream now than they used to be, and anyone blogging 3 or 4 years ago was ahead of the curve and we were able to grab attention that would be much harder now that mainstream media is playing too and there are so many more people blogging.  But it's still pretty neat.

So: my blog changes for 2007.  First, a small one.  At some point during the year I started writing a post about every book I read, probably mostly to give me some material to be posting about.  That's become a chore, because oftentimes I don't have much to say.  I'll keep listing whatever I read in the sidebar (I added a few new books there this evening) because it's a nice way for me to keep track, and because I know there are at least a couple of readers paying attention (and the dollar that Amazon throws me if you click on the links is a marginal benefit as well).  If I have something to say, I'll write a post, but if I don't, I won't.  No big deal, no one cares.

The bigger change is pretty simple.  I'll post every day, something that's more than just filler, or I want you to stop reading.  There's my 2007 commitment.  I give myself permission to skip if I'm away from home, but other than that, I want you to hold me to it.  There's a world of things I can write about even if I have nothing going on.  You have no idea what I think about all sorts of things, and to some extent, neither do I.  If I force myself to blog about, say, the Federal Reserve, it'll help me figure out what I think, and maybe it'll even spur some activity in the comments.  So I want to push myself.  The Federal Reserve is a bad example.  But you know what I mean.  That said, I'll take requests, now or later.  Anything you want, I'll either do my best or write about why I won't.  Or I'll just push myself and force something out.  You may start getting fiction.

2007 Commitment Number Two.  Anonymous Lawyer posts, every weekday, starting tomorrow.  It's inexcusable how infrequently I've been posting over there.  I should be doing better than that, and I will.

Number Three.  If you read this, you are positively impacting my life.  One thing I've felt missing in 2006 has been the chance to impact other people's lives in that same way.  The volunteer tutoring I've been doing has been okay but the program is set up in a way that you don't really work with the same kids each time, and I've mostly felt like I haven't been of that much use.  So I'm turning to you instead.  If there's some way I can help you, send me an e-mail.  It'll make me feel useful in the world.  I'm leaving this pretty vague and hoping someone will see it and take a chance.  Worst that can happen is I apologize and feel bad that I can't do whatever it is you're asking.  But you can try.

Number Four.  An odd request, which I've tried before with a slight bit of success.  It would be fairly rewarding to me to find a writing partner or two for a project or two yet to be conceived.  Maybe a screenplay, maybe something totally not a screenplay, I don't know.  I just want a couple more irons in the fire and writing with someone new will help motivate me in a way that writing on my own doesn't always.  Maybe there's a match out there.  Worst that can happen is we try and it's not a match and oh well.  So if that sparks anything in you, let's talk.

Number Five.  I've done New Years Resolutions before.  I've done them badly.  They haven't been concrete enough.  "Surf the Internet less" is too vague, and completely unmeasurable.  It's also not the right kind of resolution because it doesn't give me anything to actually do.  I'll surf the Internet less if I'm busy clipping my toenails, or whatever else I might resolve to do instead of not do.  I posted a few months ago about a Demetri Martin video I watched, a brilliant -- BRILLIANT -- one-man-show he performed called "If I."  For part of it, he talks about trying to self-actualize and putting together a point system where he measured his progress each week on a number of dimensions, trying to quantify things like "Healthy" with specific measures like how many days a week he ate fruit.  The lesson of the show is that this is silly and just set him up to fail and rig the system and wasn't actually measuring anything at all.  Yet it inspires in me the notion of a checklist for 2007, instead of resolutions, knowing full well that I probably won't end up doing most of these things, and there will be lots more things that will turn out to be more important I do instead.

So I'm making a list.  It was here last night, but I realized this morning that I don't like it, so I'll work on it and post it some other time.  In any case, Happy 2007.  Sorry this post is a monster.

Mea Culpa

Just noticed a couple of blog posts reacting to something I said in an interview about blogs and law firms.  I was asked, "Will law firms and lawyers eventually embrace the blog as a form of advertising or a demonstration of proficiency in certain fields?" and without really knowing what I'm talking about, I gave a pretty non-committal answer about how I'm not sure I think there's really any value there:

I feel like most of the people reading legal blogs are probably other lawyers, not necessarily potential clients. I'm not sure that if I were choosing a law firm, I'd be reading blogs to figure out legal competency, as opposed to checking with past clients, or however else people choose their lawyers. I guess for really technical specialties, I can see where demonstrated understanding of the area, as expressed in a blog, could be helpful. For firms looking to recruit law students, I suppose I could imagine a blog having some value in helping a firm try and stand out from the pack, but broader than that, I'd probably need to be convinced that there's great value in blogging.

It's not that I don't stand by what I said -- if I were choosing a law firm, I don't think I'd be reading blogs to figure out legal competency -- but I actually don't know what I'm talking about, and it's totally cool that two bloggers are calling me on it.  My bad. 

What I pictured in my head when answering the question was a big firm, and a big enterprise.  Like, if someone's picking Skadden to do some work for them, I'm not sure the existence of a blog, or the knowledge shown by the lawyers writing it, are going to be all that useful in the decision.  And in terms of blog readership, I was just going on the fact that the majority of the response I get from readers comes from lawyers and law students who happen to stumble across it, and not from people who'd be potential clients.  But it's almost surely the case that my blog readership doesn't have anything to do with the readership that blogs that actually talk about legal issues, and that people who are in fact potential clients would be looking for.  But the big problems with my answer are that even for the big firms like the ones I was thinking about, which are just a small part of the legal world anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about, and certainly for any other situation, I still don't know what I'm talking about.

There were a bunch of questions in that interview I wasn't terribly qualified to answer, like about at-will employment and David Lat.  It's very uncomfortable to answer an e-mail interview when you don't really know enough to be smart about it.  Here's an edited version of my answers in that interview, just for fun:

"I'm not an expert... I'm not sure... I think... Maybe not... I guess... I think... I think... I think... not necessarily... I don't know all the details here... Someone else would surely be better qualified to analyze the merits... I feel like... I'm not sure... I guess... I suppose...."  (The rest of the interview is here.)

All of that is just to say that this post by Kevin O'Keefe is totally right.  I don't know enough about the marketing potential of blogs for actual practicing lawyers (as opposed to fictional lawyers) that I should have even tried to answer the question, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to care what I think about blogs for actual practicing lawyers regardless.  I have no expertise, or experience, and really haven't even spent any time thinking about it so that I could talk intelligently about it, and my answer was just trying to answer the question without sounding too dumb.

O'Keefe writes:

What does the anonymous lawyer not know about the marketing potential of blogs?

• That a significant number of large firms in the country are experiencing marketing success from blogs. - Preston Gates, Sheppard Mullin, Davis Wright Tremaine, McGlinchey Stafford
• That some smaller firms rely entirely on blogs and the word of mouth generated thereby to generate work. - Grant Griffiths, Phil Mann
• That a well thought out focused blog may be the most cost effective marketing tool at a law firm's disposal.
• That syndicating content via RSS, done automatically by blogs, will soon be the industry standard for law firm's distributing legal content now distributed by email and hard copy.

...

But I found if I published practical legal information on the Internet I got clients. Three reasons. One, people are drawn to lawyers' on the net who publish practical legal information. That goes for consumers or business exec's. Two, people could see that I knew something about the area of law in which they needed help. Three, as the content was written by me (indexed questions and answers), people got to know me as a person.

Blogs do all three. For that reason the correct answer to Internet Law & Strategy's question is "Yes, law firms and lawyers will definitely embrace the blog as a form of advertising and demonstrating proficiency. In fact, they already are."

I think that's all very neat.  I'm glad blogs are useful for getting clients.  O'Keefe's commenters are exactly right that without blogs, I wouldn't have gotten a book deal.  Obviously.  That's absolutely true.  And if the question had been about blogs being useful to find writers writing somewhere out there in the world, at least I'd have some reason to be able to answer that question and say yes, blogs are useful.  In the law firm context, Kevin O'Keefe knows a lot more than I do.  Of course.

This Home Office Lawyer blog also posts about this stuff, and, again, that's very neat that his blog is getting him clients. 

My bad.  I didn't mean to say something wrong and stupid about blogs in the legal marketing context.  Sorry.  Interviews are no fun, although at least e-mail interviews give you time to try not to be an idiot, and it's very easy to get scared when someone asks you a question and feel like you have to give an answer, even if it's a bad one.

Wings & Vodka

Aw, man.  He even does the sign-off pretty much pitch-perfectly.  Wings and Vodka has a farewell post up,  and, really, if you haven't been reading him all along, you ought to go devour his "best of" archives and skip whatever it is you were going to do to entertain yourself tonight, because this will be better.  If I'd kept count of the number of times he's written something I wished I'd thought of first, that number would be quite high.  For the past three years, there has been no one writing funnier law school-related humor pieces than Mike.  Not even close.  It's a shame we're losing him to the dark side.  If all is right in the world, he'll write the somethings that are living inside him and find a whole new audience of fans out there in the non-blogosphere.  This would be a good place to start, if for some inexcusable reason you haven't read it already.

Blawg Review #68

Welcome to Blawg Review #68.  Blawg Review is a weekly roundup of law-related blog posts from around the web, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to host it this week, to coincide with my book release.  I'll re-link to the USA Today piece about the book, from last week, and then I'll shut up about it and get to the links.  Just for fun, I thought I'd ask Anonymous Lawyer to chime in whenever he has something to say about any of this stuff.  He speaks in italics.  Just so it's clear.

Let's start off with the Bar Exam, this week's big event for recent law school graduates. For some first-hand perspectives, check out Wings and Vodka, Cathy, another person, someone else, and one more.  Thanks, Technorati.

Second in importance to the Bar Exam this week has been the stuff going on in Israel and Lebanon.  Some links: Whether the civilians in Israel and Lebanon are as innocent as they seem.  Suing over the Israeli-Lebanon war.  David Kopel at Volokh on the UN's complicity in the Hezbollah kidnapping.

And, the Baseball Crank, who often writes about the law, has been blogging some interesting stuff about the Israel-Lebanon conflict (and also about the players whose stock has fallen throughout the major leagues).

I think ---

No.  Anonymous Lawyer, be quiet.  You are not allowed to have an opinion about the situation in Israel.

But all I was going to say was ---

No.

But ---

No.

Speaking of war, a couple of links from Balkinization: Jack Balkin on war crimes, and the relevance of Hobbes' Leviathan on what's going on in Iraq.

And, in other human tragedy news, the first Katrina insurance trial.

One of the most interesting links I was sent for this week's Blawg Review was about a cable guy who accidentally deleted screenplays off a guy's computer.  Oops.  The guy wanted punitive damages and the court ruled he can't get them.

I deleted someone's screenplay off his computer once.  I came into his office with an assignment, saw he was writing something, peeked at the screen, realized it wasn't legal work, and I picked up his firm-logoed baseball bat we gave out during the Annual Pinata Party, and smashed his computer to bits.

No you didn't.

Okay, I didn't.  But I thought it was about time I chimed in with something to say.

More entertainment news: read about Hollywood's Idea Theft Litigation King.  Or, Freedom to Differ on the Kazaa settlement.

And, big news on the world poker tour.  According to Mark at Sports Biz, 7 top poker players have filed an antitrust suit against the World Poker Tour.

They probably shouldn't bite the hand that feeds them.

Yeah, not like an anonymous blogger trashing his fictional firm.  At least these poker players have actually been wronged.  You're just whining about how hard it is to be rich and powerful even though you don't really work any harder than people who make a lot less money doing things a lot less fun.

In this week's most bizarre legal news, via Quizlaw, the host of a PBS Kids show was fired because she advocated anal sex in an online video.

I think Kirkland & Ellis has a video segment about that on its website.

No, that's work-life balance.

Whatever, that's just as ridiculous for a law firm to be talking about.

Speaking of law firms, here's The Greatest American Law Clerk, arguing that large firms may not be the best places to spend your summer; a blawg discussion on billable hours; and Bruce MacEwen on The War For Talent at law firms and how it's hard to make sure the right people are the ones moving up the ladder to partnership. 

Also, in New Jersey, lawyers can't advertise using the term "super lawyer."

IP News of the Week: Who owns the copyright in a contract drafted by a firm?  The law firm, the lawyer, or the client?  Patents, trade secrets and inventions in Heinlein's fiction.  And, trademark tips for your web application, from Steve Nipper, who I met at LexThink a little more than a year ago.  I think this is a great post -- much more interesting than I expected from the title.

Law School-related links: Chris Geidner on the decision not to hire Juan Cole as a Yale law professor.  Orin Kerr on banning laptops in classrooms.  And Tucker Max says you shouldn't go to law school, and the terrific group blog Unfogged has a post about it, with a robust comments thread.

On blogs: Tung Yin on legal blogs and the Supreme Court confirmation process.  The status of legal blogs and the search for legitimacy (PDF).  Howard Bashman writes, Are Blogs the New Friends of the Court?  From Evan Schaeffer's terrific blog, a link to a Bloggasm interview with Overlawyered's Walter Olson. Rob Hyndman on the dearth of CEOs who blog.

Long posts I didn't finish reading but look interesting and I want to link to them anyway: Monaco Jerry about the legal fiction that a defendant is really a participant in his own trial.  Matt Barr at Socratic Rhythm Method on Presidential Signing Statements made when the President signs new laws, regarding how he plans on interpreting them.  Whether borders should matter in the context of Internet Tax Jurisdiction.  The focus on the short run in antitrust law produces conservative results.  There's even a graph!

And, some assorted posts I like but couldn't find a category for:

Carolyn Elefant: "Would You Render Ineffective Counsel to Spare Your Client from Death?"

At Concurring Opinions: the Nassau County D.A. says "you can't have part-time litigators." 

LA's Dopest Attorney, an expert in drug cases.

Ernie the Attorney on negative states of mind.

Professor Bainbridge writes about "The Judicial We."

Finally, in our pro bono section this week:

What Sherry Fowler likes about coaching special olympics.

That's not billable.

Thanks, AL.  You've been really helpful today.

No problem.

Thanks for reading.  Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

Blawg Review

I'm hosting Blawg Review #68 here on Monday, a roundup of interesting blawg posts of the week.  Feel free to throw me some suggestions, from your blog or others, either by e-mailing me or through the Blawg Review submission form over at its web home. Already there's all sorts of stuff lined up, including something about Camus that someone submitted but I haven't read yet.

Response to Request: Honesty

Scheherazade asks: "What's the hardest thing to talk or write honestly about?"

I've saved this request for a few days, because it felt like the kind of thing I needed to be in the mood to write.  But I think I have an answer.  I think it's hardest for me to talk or write honestly about things I fear will make people dislike me, even if they're fair and honest things I'm thinking or feeling, and even though in most cases I'm almost certainly underestimating the audience, whatever audience it is, and imagining a reaction different from what the actual reaction would be.

A relatively trivial example is probably the books and movies I'll write about.  I'm pretty sure that when I started blogging, I was a lot more willing to post something negative about a book I didn't like.  At some point over the past three years -- and maybe this is due to Technorati, or maybe it's due to more and more people using Google for more and more things, or maybe it was due to a growing readership on this blog -- I started getting a fair number more e-mails from people whose things I'd post about.  I don't think I've ever written anything too terrible about anything, but, honestly, it's a stomach-turning kind of feeling to get an e-mail from the director of an independent movie eighteen hours after you write a relatively critical post about his film, telling you he was disappointed by the post and thought it was unfair.  I think I still write a fair number of negative things about things I write and see, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit I'm probably a lot more careful than I need to be.  I feel like in my head I divide things into two categories, when I think about posting.  Mass-market things -- anything on TV, movie releases, Broadway shows, mass-market books getting other press, any sort of consumer product in stores, anything posted on the Internet -- I feel like I don't really have any qualms about posting something negative.  Anything I write is a drop in the bucket, and whatever I'm writing is a drop in the bucket.  But smaller-scale things -- an off-off-off-Broadway show where I can imagine the writers are going to write and take personally anything anyone posts anywhere, a book written by someone I know is probably reading my blog, obviously anything anyone I'm friends with is involved in -- I'll admit I'm a lot more careful.  When I post about something, it's honest -- I won't write something positive about something unless it's really what I think, but there are shows I've seen that I haven't posted about, there are some books I've read that I haven't posted about.  For the sole reason that I'm not trying to make anyone upset with me, and it doesn't serve me to do so.  I can riff on Quaker Oatmeal Squares and how awful they are without feeling like it will seriously come back to haunt me, but if I write about how I think a performer in an improv show really sucks, well, then I'm just being a dick.

A less trivial example probably deals with how I post about things that I have real opinions on, or about things that are happening to me in real life, or about the world.  And I think it's actually as much about how I interact generally, and not just on the blog.  I may have a skewed memory of these things, but I'm pretty sure that when I was seven or eight years old, I was kind of intolerable to other kids.  I fear that for a little while, I was the kid who kept raising his hand in class with the answer.  I was a second-grade gunner.  I'd have to go back and ask my teachers (or classmates) to know for sure, but I'm pretty sure the adults liked me more than the kids did, at least for a little while.  In fourth grade, I remember my teacher, Mr. Osterweil (who was a terrific teacher, and I wonder what's happened to him -- I remember specifically that he didn't use textbooks in same way that other teachers had done before him, and actually crafted lessons on his own, and taught us a lot more interesting things than the textbooks did... we had a unit on Brooklyn neighborhoods, where we had to label a map with all the different community names, and then there was some sort of huge floor map we did something with, I think... and all that stuck in my head in a way that most stuff we learn in elementary school really didn't... he was just a really good teacher), had a set of math cards in the back of the room, and if we did all 60-some of them by the end of the year, we would get extra credit.  And I got to the end, and one card was missing.  So I couldn't get the extra credit.  And I think I remember writing him a note about how it was unfair, and feeling sort of wronged by it.  Clearly, any kid who's going to feel wronged by a missing math card... yeah, so I was probably kind of a gunner, at the age of nine.

At some point, things started to click that maybe it's better to sort of underplay stuff, and let things roll off you a little bit more, to have a happier and more well-adjusted life.  I expect it was a gradual process, and took a few years to totally click.  But what I've internalized, from elementary school, is that there's maybe a pretty narrow space between competence/confidence and arrogance, and I find that I try really hard to make sure I stay there, and if given a choice, I'm much more comfortable to seem doubting and unsure than I am to seem arrogant or obnoxious. 

I think I fear that deep down -- and it's way deep down and unexpressed by now, I think -- I could be a gunner, and I have to do everything I can not to let that out.  Gunner's the wrong word -- I raised my hand about a dozen times in all of law school, and never had the urge to raise it any more than that.  It's not even about competitiveness or anything like that.  But it's about a sense that in more contexts than necessary, I find that I'd so much rather not press a point and have people like me than take even the tiniest risk of being obnoxious about anything at all, to the point that I'll let other people take the lead in almost any context.

But I'm not convinced this isn't a good thing.  I mean, I like myself a lot better than I think I'd have liked the eight-year-old me that I imagine in my head.   I don't mind playing low-status in an interaction, and letting someone else feel important.  But I'm sure it comes through on the blog.  I downplay my opinions, and temper them sometimes, to make sure I'm not coming across differently than I mean to.  Even if it cuts against the power of whatever point I'm trying to make, and weakens whatever it is I'm trying to say.  But I'd rather that than have someone think I'm being arrogant.

A couple of my friends came up and saw the law school parody show last year, when I was one of the writers.  And at the party after the show, one of my law school friends made some comment about how there were points in the writing process where I'd been stubborn about getting my way, and the truth is that I probably was.  There were definitely things -- little things and bigger things -- that were important to me, seemed at the time a lot more important than they probably were, and I absolutely pushed more than I necessarily should have if my goal was lack of drama instead of doing something I thought would make the show better.  But one of my friends from undergrad who was there reacted by saying that the person saying I'd been difficult must be stupid, because I'm not difficult.  I was really pleased by that reaction, probably more than it makes sense to be.  Because in the end, I'm much happier with myself if someone feels like I'm not difficult than if someone feels like I'm right.  Even better to be both, and best of all to be right and no one even realizes they were ever wrong -- but it's when I choose "right" over "not difficult" that I end up feeling really bad about myself, because it's that nine-year-old gunner coming through, and he's been banned from the kingdom.

Senior year of college, we had to write a thesis to graduate.  I was a little lazy about finding an advisor, and ended up with one who I hadn't known beforehand, and didn't know me, and we were both a little bit lazy about setting up meetings and about interacting much at all.  I'd send half-hearted outlines, wouldn't get much response, and wouldn't push for anything more.  It was my fault as much as hers for not having more interaction, absolutely -- I imagine we both wished the other had pushed more.  But it ended up that we met in person once all year, and exchanged maybe three or four short e-mails in total.  I wrote the paper, and it was fine, but at the oral presentation session afterwards, it was fairly clear to me that my advisor hadn't read the paper very carefully, and had misread the conclusion.  A couple of days later, I picked up my grade from my mailbox, and it was a B.  Grade inflation being what it is, that was a pretty lackluster grade.  And some of her written comments didn't make a ton of sense, given the paper.  My instant reaction was that the grade didn't seem fair, and I started walking toward her office, thinking about what I was going to say.  I got about halfway there -- and this was maybe a 5-minute walk, nothing major -- and stopped.  It hit me that there was really nothing to accomplish.  The grade didn't really matter, it wasn't going to affect my life, surely to get someone to reconsider a grade was going to be an ordeal, and not end up making me feel terribly good about the whole process, and even if the grade became a B+, did it really matter?  And I turned around and went back to my dorm.  I'm really, really proud of that decision.  And it's a bizarre decision to be proud of, perhaps.  I'm pretty sure my paper deserved a better grade than it got.  But I made the decision to let it go, and it felt like exactly the kind of decision the nine-year-old me wouldn't have made, but exactly the decision that the person I aspire to be would make.  I've never told anyone this story, because it's so silly.  Somehow writing this post triggered the memory.

Okay.  I think I've answered the question.  And in doing so, I've tried not to think about how this post will come off, and to just be honest about what the question got me thinking.  So there it is.  I'll take more requests if anyone has any -- I think this one finishes up the ones I've received.

Bloggergate

Jeff Jarvis has a post about the controversy with George Clooney and The Huffington Post.   As I understand it: The Huffington Post put up a blog post supposedly written by Clooney, but it turned out it was actually just a compilation of things he's said in interviews that Huffington's people cut and pasted to pretend it was a piece of writing from Clooney, and his Good Night And Good Luck publicist said that was cool, but never checked with Clooney.

I think Jarvis is totally right in his thoughts on this, so go read him.  Basically, Huffington is saying that what she did was fine, and it's not wrong to paste some stuff together and call it a blog post.  That a blog post is about the message, no matter what the medium.  Well, not really.  Blogs are a form like anything else is a form.  A good blog post is different from a good magazine article is different from a good book.  And there's a trust you put into a blog post -- posting something is a social contract that the person named on the post wrote it.  And without anything to indicate otherwise, I think it's a social contract that the person who wrote it intended it for this use.  Not that I couldn't take a law school paper I wrote and post it up here (although that would be a crappy post, and I'd probably want to label it as what it originally was anyway), but I couldn't take someone else's article from somewhere and post it up here as a blog post without their permission.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Read the Jarvis piece.

Employees Who Blog: Actual Law-Related Stuff

The law professor authors of a new article about employees who blog, legal protections, and what the state of the law is and could be, sent me a link to their paper.  It does what my New York Times op-ed from August should have aspired to do.  It's a solid read, for anyone interested in the topic.  When I was writing the Times piece, I wished there was a piece like this out there, and I couldn't find it.  That's because they hadn't written it yet.

Twilight of The Blogs

I don't mean this one specifically.  I'm still writing.  But Slate's got a really interesting article called "Twilight of the Blogs" that says blogs have peaked.  It's a good read, and it makes me feel somewhat vindicated for a brief post I wrote on December 1: "Lots of articles about weblogs recently. Mainstream media outlets all have weblogs. Weblogs feel like they're jumping the shark. So what's next?" (and then I said something about podcasts, but that's not interesting.)  In truth, that post could have been a lot longer, but it's pretty crappy and hypocritical for me to say anything bad about weblogs, since I've gotten very very lucky with my own adventures in blogging.

It's silly for me to pretend that the timing has had nothing to do with the fact that I've been able to get some attention for my blog writing.  I'd like to think I'm a good writer, but, hey, when I started writing about law school, in August 2002, there weren't that many weblogs out there.  I'd never read a weblog before I started writing one -- I'd seen some article somewhere about Blogger and thought it would be cool to have an online account of my law school experience, and wanted a reason to write something every day, but it wasn't an orchestrated attempt at anything.  I've got no reason to believe that if I'd started law school a year later, or certainly two years later, that I would have been able to build up any sort of audience at all.  And similarly, the timing of the Anonymous Lawyer stuff ended up working out really well, through no intentional market timing on my part -- in the past year there's been so much more media attention on blogs than there was before, and now every newspaper site has blogs, magazine sites have blogs, news channels have blogs -- they've been co-opted by the mainstream media and they're not "the new thing" anymore.  I'd be naive, or deluded, to think that the new-ness of blogging, and the eagerness of the mainstream media to make sure they weren't going to be left behind, shouldn't get the vast majority of the credit for the Times piece about Anonymous Lawyer and my book deal.  I don't feel like it takes anything away from my writing to know that Anonymous Lawyer starting in March 2006 is a less interesting animal than Anonymous Lawyer starting in March 2004.  And that's luck on my part, not design.

But the Slate article doesn't answer what I wanted help answering in December -- and I haven't come up with any answers yet.  If blogs have reached their peak, what's the next frontier?  Maybe there isn't one.  Or maybe the people who know what it is aren't reading weblogs anymore -- or they just don't want to share.  Heck, if I knew, I probably wouldn't want to share either.  At least not yet.

Opinionistas Reveals Herself

There's a New York Observer article where it's revealed that the author of the Opinionistas blog is a 27-year-old law firm associate (well, until recently) named Melissa Lafsky.  I've been compulsively reloading the Observer web site for the past fifteen minutes or so, as I started to notice they were putting up this week's new articles, because I was briefly interviewed on the phone this morning by the reporter and wanted to see whether I got mentioned in the piece.  I didn't realize until I saw the Gawker story this afternoon that it was for an article about Opinionistas' reveal -- the article talks more generally about anonymous bloggers coming forward, and that's what the reporter told me it was about.  But once I saw the Gawker story, I figured that's what it was.  [Incidentally, as of right now, the link to Page 3 of the article is broken on the site.  My amazing URL-decoding skills have located it here.]

I am briefly mentioned in Page 2 of the article:

...JEREMY BLACHMAN, WHO WRITES the Anonymous Lawyer blog in the voice of a fictional law-firm partner, also had decided that he wanted to do something besides practice law. So he grabbed for that little brass ring by dropping an e-mail to a Times reporter who had interviewed him on a prior occasion.

“I knew that I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure how to find those opportunities. I was definitely eager for someone to write a story about me,” he said.

Sidenote: I find it so nervewracking to get interviewed by a reporter for anything, even something this small and innocuous, especially on the phone.  I am not very good at this.  I should take a deep breath and actually think about giving a good answer, instead of just trying to think as I talk.  This was a five-minute interview, easy questions about why I revealed myself as Anonymous Lawyer, and still I obsessed afterwards about whether I could have possibly said something wrong or that could have come off differently from how I meant it, or anything like that.  Maybe I'm just neurotic, but it's really frightening to talk to a reporter on the phone.  I don't know how people who have to do it regularly do it effectively.

I'm totally curious what other people think about Opinionistas' reveal, but I don't know that I have anything to add to the discussion.  I think the Observer piece is actually pretty interesting, regarding the coordinated set of activities she's done before coming forward (like, "Last week, she posed in a nightgown for a spread on female bloggers for a future issue of Fashion Week Daily.").  It shows how this stuff has changed just over the course of a year.  I had no idea what would happen after my Times piece.  I got very lucky.  But I didn't expect to end up with a book deal, or plan on it.  I didn't know how many people would see the piece, or what the response would be.  Now people are orchestrating this stuff.  The blogosphere's growing up, kids.  I hear Instapundit's posing in that same nightgown spread.

Welcome To My Brand New Weblog

Welcome.  And happy new year.  This is an introductory post.  I'll try to make it relatively painless.  I started blogging in August of 2002, a couple of weeks before I started law school.  I'd never read a blog before I started my own.  I'd seen an article about Blogger and it sounded like exactly what I wanted to try.  So I did. 

I'd spent the time after college graduation and before law school working in Texas for a software company named Trilogy, in their marketing department, writing brochures and webpage content and things like that.  I'd send long e-mails to friends about it.  I'm sure it got annoying.  I wanted a place to write things, to store my thoughts, to feel like I was communicating with the outside world about what was going on in my head.  In college I wrote sketches and songs for a theater group. Afterwards I missed that.  I missed writing more than I expected I would.  I wanted an outlet.  I wanted a way to force myself to write every day.

The blog did that, and in a way I was very lucky with my timing.  There weren't that many law school blogs when I started.  Blogging was relatively new.  Now there are tons of these things, but I was able to build up an audience relatively quickly not only because of the content, I think, but because there just weren't a ton of other ones competing for the same audience.  I continue to be surprised about how many people keep coming back to read what I have to say.

Since law school ended, my blog has felt somewhat devoid of purpose.  I've been writing partly because I want to, but partly because I feel like it would be silly to drop it at this point, and lose the audience and the goodwill that I may or may not have built up.  I like the feeling of connectedness to the outside world.  I've made a fair number of actual real-world friends through this, and a lot of e-mail friends.  It's very nice to have this other way of meeting people, and of engaging in the world, in addition to the normal ways we meet people and interact.  Doing this has made me a happier person, I think.  A more fulfilled person.  And a better writer.  It's forced me to look at the world in a different way, noticing things that are interesting, that are unusual, that are worth writing about.  I observe better than I used to.  I feel like I do normal things with a bit more of a purpose, because there's potentially a story even in the trip to the post office, if I watch closely enough.

Part of the feeling that my blog has lacked purpose lately has been because I've been extraordinarily lucky and fortunate that it's done more than I could ever have imagined it would do as far as helping me to figure out a way to write for a living.  I started blogging thinking, perhaps naively, that this was a pretty terrific way to get my writing out there into the world, and at least make it possible for something good to happen for me.  No one was going to see anything I was writing if it lived in my desk drawer or on my hard drive.  Probably no one was going to accidentally stumble on an e-mail I sent to a friend, and offer me some terrific opportunity, no matter how far it got forwarded.  But the weblog was a way for me to at least know that if lightning wanted to strike, I was doing something to put myself in a position to receive it.  And for most of the time I've been blogging, it's very much been to try and hit that right nerve.  I wrote a law school purity test I thought was pretty neat and would get some attention.  It didn't.  It's hard to predict.  I wrote a couple of presidential debate parodies that got linked in some cool places.  The audience built.  I felt like I was doing something right, and doing this well enough to get noticed.

On a whim, I started Anonymous Lawyer. It wasn't part of a plan, I didn't know it would resonate, I didn't know I'd be able to do it for as long as I have, and building the kind of audience it's built.  I started it partly because I stumbled on a site called How Appalling, which parodied Howard Bashman's How Appealing, and kind of wished I'd come up with the idea.  It wasn't so much that I thought parodying How Appealing was such a tremendous idea, but it was something new with the blog form, that wasn't being done, and so I started thinking about other things that weren't being done with the form.  I knew there were a bunch of a associates with blogs, and solo practitioners, and other lawyers like that, but there weren't any partners writing blogs.  So I started Anonymous Lawyer, thinking I'd be able to keep it going for a week or so, no one would care, and it would just die out pretty quickly.

It was more fun to write than I thought it would be, and the rest is still kind of bizarre and unfathomable.  The New York Times ran a story on it, and I've somehow gotten the opportunity to write a novel based on the character, which is what I'm doing now, saving me from actually having to practice law, at least for the time being.

So, fair or unfair, part of why my blog has felt sort of aimless recently is because I don't have all of my eggs in this basket, and I'm not putting my hopes on this blog that it will be the vehicle through which lightning will strike.  Lightning already struck.  Now I just want a place to keep writing, and to keep forcing me to come up with new and interesting things to say, and to maintain that connection that blogging creates.

But that's not good enough.  It's not fair to anyone who's coming to read this, and it's not interesting enough to keep me writing.  That's why the new site.  I wanted a fresh start.  The law school stuff lives in the archives back at Blogger, it's not going anywhere, I'm very proud of it, I think there's a lot of interesting and worthwhile stuff there, but, like television, I feel like things run their course and sometimes you need a new slate.  This is the season where three of my characters are all getting pregnant, someone's dying, and we have a guest star signed up for a 10-episode stint.  Or something like that.  I want to do my best to make this feel as relevant and interesting and worthwhile as it did when I was writing about law school and people were reading.  This is a journey to find that content.  To figure out some things that people aren't doing with their weblogs now that I could be doing, to write some worthwhile and compelling content, and to make this a destination worth visiting.

It's also a place for me to write about something I haven't read that much about, but feel like I might want to chronicle.  I don't know what happens once I finish writing my book.  I feel like the meeting where I go and look at potential covers is probably worth writing about.  I feel like whatever starts to happen with the marketing is probably worth writing about.  I feel like, in the spirit of Anonymous Lawyer, "Anonymous Author" might be interesting.  Perhaps it won't be.  I'm not sure yet.  But you can discover that with me, if you like. 

The one thing this blog has that the other one didn't is comments.  I'm wary of the comment function.  I think there'll be posts where it's enabled and posts where it's not.  One thing that isn't being done all that effectively on the Internet is getting a select number of voices together to have coherent and substantive conversations.  There's lots of long and hard-to-follow message board threads, on all sorts of topics.  There's some small and well-informed two-, three-, four-person discussions.  Slate does that very well, especially with its movie reviewers, but also in some other contexts.  The Huffington Post does it relatively poorly.  Daily Kos and anything like that are all too big to support content that creates real value.  We tried something like that on De Novo last year with a little bit of success, but it was hard.  I'm thinking about ways to make comments actually provide some value.  I'll see what happens.

Okay, this hasn't been as painless as I hoped it would be.  This is a long post.  Tomorrow you get a different attempt at an introduction: shorter, funnier, and hopefully worth checking out.  Enjoy your New Years Eve.  And happy 2006.