Most legal blogs will fail. That's what it says over at Corante. Of course these are business blogs meant to help a lawyer make money, so that's different from what most edubloggers want. Dennis M. Kennedy quotes Jerry Lawson predicting that 4 of 5 blogs will fail:

It will probably shake out something like this: About 80% of all lawyer web logs will fail. The remaining 20% will have greater or lesser degrees of success, mostly modest. One per cent or so, maybe less, will be extremely successful. However, some of that 1% will be so successful that they will make their owners very, very glad they got into the blogging game. #

Kennedy recommends two highly focused blogs as models, both of which are plainly meant to serve particular parts of the profession: Trademark Blog and Visalaw.com, which looks less like a blog than the first one does.

One cheery note: Kennedy recommends paying good bloggers well to help start up a new legal blog. His eighth item is less cheery but realistic:

8. Are you trying to say that blogging is hard work with no guarantee of success in the classic sense of generation of business and increasing revenues?

Yup. You didn’t really think that it would be different from anything else, did you?

In the comments section, Angelo Paparelli speculates that a lawyer's blog can be successful with fewer, longer posts if they are rich in content and even if they don't link much -- less "bloggy" in approach than Trademark Blog, say. Commentor Kevin O'Keefe disagrees with Kennedy's suggestion that you not open your blog to readers until you have posted thirty times:

Preparing thirty posts before you launch your blog to prove you can maintain a blog is nuts. Hell, you do not really know what you are doing or develop a style until after you have begun to publish a blog to the Internet. Publishing a blog is not just writing content and publishing it to the Internet. There is a lot of interaction and feedback with others on the net that comes with blogging. It's the positive feedback you'll get and word of your expertise spreading around the Internet that will inspire you to keep blogging.

Blogging for lawyers, then, is not just presenting content good enough and often enough to create a good virtual word of mouth for the firm. You have to "know what you are doing" -- in other words, a blog is a particular genre different from other genres lawyers might already know. You have to develop a style -- blogging is not just clear presentation of content, but also a presentation of self, which for lawyers is the presentation of a version of one's professional self. You have to take some pleasure in the "interaction and feedback" essential to the genre of blogging -- you have to want to engage others on your topic, linking and commenting. If you do that, you are blogging rather than just posting. If you do all of these things often and well enough, the law blog might be a success, bringing fame and business to the firm.

So it is vital to understand, after some experience, that blogging is a very particular genre. That's probably at least as much of a hurdle for our students as it is for lawyers who would be bloggers. O'Keefe also says that

The virtual world is now bigger than the offline one. Have an effective appearance in the virtual world, a place where most lawyers do such a poor job of marketing, and you'll get plenty of work.

Now that's tantalizing, especially that first sentence. I wonder what it means for us. [0 & P]