The corporate-type blogs have been growing in number and they'll keep growing. And just like the individual blogs some of them will be well-done and interesting while some will fall flat on their faceless faces. But even the corporations that like to operate behind a committee-created mask will learn that when the clock strikes twelve, and the costume party ends, the masks have to come off.

My law firm has experimented with blogging, and at some point we'll develop a full-fledged blog strategy. When we do, we'll probably do it very well. After all, we have the desirable (and accurate) reputation as a place where good lawyers do serious work without taking themselves too seriously. For now, the fact that I blog is good enough for our firm. But eventually we'll feel more pressure to have a firm-sponsored blog. The pressure will come when other Louisiana firms start blogs. Just like this firm in Baton Rouge, which has just recently started a weblog called Louisiana Law Blog.

How quickly will law firms move to develop weblogs? It depends on a lot of internal and external factors. But the clock is ticking. And for some firms that sound is loud and annoying; for others it is stirring and prompting them to act. When will your firm create a blog?

Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick.......

Of the blawgs that are not active anymore, I found that the average life of these blawgs was just over six months. So I've been using that period of time as a benchmark -- separating the dabblers from the blawgs that will likely be around for some time.

Weblogs (legal and not) began as solo activities -- individuals wanting to find their own particular voice on the Internet. The medium has evolved, however, to allow for and encourage collaboration between bloggers -- as Dennis intimates with his "virtual law firm," this has tremendous implications for the future.

Though people (myself included) often talk about the potential for blogs to humanize and improve the perception of a much maligned profession, the fact is they'll also continue to expose unpleasant and unsavory aspects too. There will be great opportunities for firms and other institutions to engage in real conversation and hopefully accomplish meaningful change about common areas of criticism and discontent. There likewise will be opportunities to look foolish, be ridiculed, and lose business and goodwill for firms and institutions that mistakenly conclude they can afford to turn a deaf ear to these voices.

• First: Blogs. Ordinary, mostly nontechnical people like lawyers need an easy way to participate in online discourse, and it's important psychologically somehow (and useful from a practical standpoint) to have a "place" that's all your own.
• Second: RSS. It's hard to separate this from #1, because the idea of blogging without syndication, especially given the capabilities of the blogging tools available today, is just silly. Syndication of not just text but audio and video makes whatever it is you have to say extremely user friendly. This is Good for all concerned.
• Third: Collaborations among bloggers. It's hard to separate this from #1, because it's hard to blog in a vacuum. But active collaboration adds another layer that perhaps not everyone needs. If all your schedule permits is posting your insights from time to time to a (syndicated) blog, that's great. You're already collaborating and communicating across organizations and disciplines in a way you couldn't have done without blogging.

We are also seeing aggregation, Between Lawyers and ReThink IP being two early examples.

And we are seeing corporatization - the Law.com network being an early example.

Not every lawyer should have a blog, because not everyone is predisposed to processing and sharing information in the way blogs facilitate. Lawyers who answer "yes" to more than one of the following questions but don't have a blog should think about starting one:

1. Do you read or otherwise take in many materials related to your practice, above and beyond what strictly speaking you need to get through your daily workload?
2. Does your practice put you in places and situations that don't get much or any news coverage, but you think others might nonetheless find interesting or informative?
3. Do you email colleagues items you think they might want or need?
4. Do you make lists? (Mentally or otherwise.)
5. Do you spend much time using search engines?
6. Do you write about legal issues or developments for print publications or other outlets?
7. Do you hate the idea of keeping extraneous paper around, but like being able to find and refer to things you've read and found significant for one reason or another?
8. Do you like staying well informed about developments that affect your practice and your clients' lives and businesses?
9. Do you have a sense of humor?
10. Are there one or a few substantive areas of the law you know pretty well, or better yet, very well?
11. Are you sufficiently professional and comfortable in your skin that you will link generously to material — including competitors — that's not part of yourlawfirm.com without worrying that you'll never see that reader again?
12. Are you sufficiently professional and comfortable in your skin that you will publicly acknowledge and correct mistakes?
13. Do you think your clients, potential clients, and colleagues probably already get more email and paper mail than they'd like?
14. Are you less than thrilled with your ability to manage your conventional practice-related Web site and keep it up to date? Are you less than thrilled with its ability to get your message out to colleagues, clients, and potential clients?
15. Are you willing to engage in public discourse with people you don't yet know that will raise your profile and sharpen your writing and thinking, but might not translate directly or immediately into paying work?
16. Are you basically a good egg? (Lawyers who think hiding associate contact information is a good idea, for example, might not be the best candidates for blogging. Then again, it could prompt some sort of "born again" epiphany.)

Law firms are a different story. Before a firm decides to publish one or more weblogs, it and its prospective bloggers in residence (and I do hope they are "in residence," rather than commissioned for the purpose of generating weblog posts) had better be able to answer all of these questions affirmatively. Law firms (like all businesses) aren't a who, they're a what, and blogging (when done effectively) is a who-oriented pursuit. All the firms to date I've seen successfully embrace blogging are small or solo shops. I'm not saying a large firm can't do it, I just think there are more hurdles to overcome in that setting. Until weblogs are mainstream enough that thoughts like these are a quaint anachronism and people just know what works well and what doesn't, businesses (including law firms) should think hard about whether they've got what it takes to do a good "official" blog. If not, following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Sun, and Harvard is worth considered thought — i.e., we're not people but we've got people, spectacular ones, here they are. (I'm also assuming this question was aimed at public blogs. I think most law firms would save all kinds of time, money, and lawyer brain cells by replacing their existing intranets with a network of internal, syndicated, well-indexed and searchable blogs.)