3L Epiphany Appears in Its First News Article

3L Epiphany has now appeared in its first online news article. The article is entitled "Hobby Turns Into Project To Track Lawyers' Blogs And Their Impact," and is written by John Tompkins of the Daily Court Review.

For those readers visiting 3L Epiphany for the first time because of this article, here is the list of 610 legal blogs, and a description of my upcoming blog taxonomy.

I have provided a few excerpts from the article below:

Writing a web log (commonly known as a blog) is usually seen as a personal journal that everyone can read.

But a recent trend among lawyers who write blogs (or blawgs) has caught the interest of a law student at Ohio State’s Moritz School of Law. Ian Best loved the idea of blogs so much that he started his own – and is now getting credit for it in an independent study course.

“I’m researching all of the legal blogs out there,” Best said. “I’m creating a taxonomy of blog. I’m trying to get an overview of what the legal blogosphere looks like.”

…

Best says the best feature of the multitude of legal blogs is how research is presented. Legal journals, he said, tend to be more static while the legal blogs are more interactive, making it easier to learn from. He discovered, for instance, that not only attorneys and judges were reading [Prof. Doug Berman’s] blog about sentencing guidelines. “Criminal defendants and victims were reading his blog,” Best said. “They’re not going to pick up a law journal. But they can read this and learn how this applies to their situation. This moves away from the ivory tower.”

…

Though the notoriety blogging has received is recent, Best said what it could achieve for the legal profession and mass communication is a broader audience and a more educated public.

“It’s all online and it’s a superior way of doing it,” he said. “That’ll be an outreach to the public. Legal blogs have a real potential that can be transformed.”

As a byproduct to his research, Best said he hopes to find out more about what the public and lawyers are using the blog for.   

I am sincerely grateful to Mr. Tompkins and the Daily Court Review for writing about 3L Epiphany. I wanted to point out two minor corrections to the excerpts above. “I’m creating a taxonomy of blog” should read “…blogs.” And “blogs have a real potential that can be transformed” should read “…transformational.”