This musing will be short but to the point. I know that many of my readers are lawyers in large firms so I am openly soliciting comments about this post from them as well as any other readers. It has been about 3 years since I started this blog and I have been fortunate to enjoy a fair measure of popular acclaim. Now, my firm wants to play a greater role in that popular acclaim. Read: This is a "heads up" that you may see some changes in the graphics and layout of this blog in the future at some undetermined point.
As other partners in large law firms will attest, being a partner does not mean that you control your own destiny. I have paid out-of-pocket for the costs to start and maintain this blog and the money paid to the very helpful folks at LexBlog has been well worth it, but now the firm wants to pick up the monthly costs in exchange for adding the firm’s logo and other graphics similar to those on the firm’s website. LexBlog did such a good job with my blog set-up that after my firm saw how well it turned out, about a year later they paid LexBlog to start separate firm-sponsored blogs.
Loyal Readers: If you created something over the span of 3 years, mostly during nights and weekends (for example a novel about the law), with your firm’s blessing, how would you feel if your firm then decided that it wanted to have a greater say in the "public image" of what you created?
I keep in touch with several prominent bloggers in large firms who still have their own blogs that have not been brought into the firm’s fold. For example, Cathy Kirkman’s Silicon Valley Media Law Blog (Wilson Sonsini) and Mark Herrmann’s Drug and Device Law (Jones, Day) and Daniel Schwartz’s Connecticut Employment Law (Epstein Becker). Good luck, my friends.