21 July 2008

Sometimes a whisper is a shout.

Whisper, a branding strategy blog, hosts Blawg Review #169 this week. If branding strategy seems to you like a counterintuitive theme for a collection of the best legal blogging of the past week, Whisper sets you straight straightaway:
Lawyers, and law firms, have always been brands.

As with any organization, product, or service, people think about a lawyer or law firm in terms of a handful of qualities or attributes, a promise, some kind of story.

That simple narrative can have a major impact on their decision to contact a particular firm, to buy its services, to do business there, and to affiliate with the lawyer.

In today’s globalized, networked world, every lawyer has to compete with every other lawyer for their share of the world’s clients, consumers, businesses, investment, capital, respect, and attention.

How a lawyer or law firm stakes out and communicates their distinctive place within the world largely determines which ones succeed, and which falter, in the race for economic prosperity.

Highlighting some of the top brands in the legal blogosphere is certainly not an easy task, but the Whisperers manage to do it in style. The bigger brands this week include Dan Hull's market-while-you-work path to building a "muscle boutique" firm, Eric Goldman's online guide to finding Eric Goldman, and a post where Volokh Conspirator Orin Kerr's take on the exclusionary rule is augmented by a torrent of argument in the Conspiracy's non-exclusive comments.

Next week's Blawg Review will be hosted by another rapidly-rising brand, Scott Greenfield's Simple Justice blog. Greenfield's commentary is consistently amongst the most intelligent and engaging in the legal blogosphere. I know that I'm not alone in my eager anticipation for next week's edition of the carnival of legal blogging.

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