Outside Counsel

Bag and Baggage on the professional benefits of blogging. I concur. The "news hole" that needs to be filled here at Outside Counsel compels me to keep better abreast of developments in our glamour profession than I might otherwise, and the act of writing about these developments makes me think about these things, instead of merely noting them in passing. This blawg (Denise's coinage, of course) is less about the substance of the law than it is on what it is like to be a lawyer-- or at least that is its intention. I suppose any professional inclined to introspection might write about how it feels to do a particular job, but lawyers obsess a great deal about this. I (modestly) think of Outside Counsel as being in the tradition of Holmes' The Path of the Law, or Karl Llewellyn's The Bramble Bush. (A somewhat more contemporary work in this vein is Lawrence Joseph's Lawyerland -- which anyone who is interested in this stuff should read.)

One of the things that I think is interesting about our glamour profession is that it is a community, and I believe that lawyer blogs foster this in a new and worthwhile way. It certainly seems to me that the act of blogging is initiating law students into what we do in a way that was not available to me when I was in school, and I think that the authors of Sua Sponte, or Omer Poos (and hey, where have you been, Alice?) will be better lawyers because they have engaged in this sort of thinking aloud process. I tell my students that they should read Unbillable Hours to get a glimpse of what practice can be like.

I've tried describing what is going on here to people who don't read blogs, or blawgs, but it's like trying to tell a stranger about rock'n'roll. Once they get it, they start to do it (one of the beauties of the technology is its incredible accessibility). It is probably true that we don't really know what effect this will have, but I think it will be profound, and I'm glad that I'm in on it.