Welcome to the SRVH Blog

 In Blog, Firm News

In August 2014, Sherrard Roe Voigt & Harbison launched its firm blog.  We want to welcome our readers and visitors to our new blog.  We are excited about this new venture.  In this opening blog post, I will address some of the risks and opportunities that we envision for a law firm blog.

In many ways, blogging and legal practice should be easy companions.  The law is fluid, with frequent developments.  Each day, new judicial opinions are issued, and new legislation is enacted.  These developments offer a never-ending stream of potential blog posts.  Lawyers are already consuming this information and know how to understand and explain it.  Lawyers are trained communicators, and blogging is another form of communication.   Lawyers produce content similar to blog posts for CLEs, and it should be easy to convert that content to blog posts.  Finally, lawyers write for a living.  Why not write a little more each week?

Yet in other ways, blogging and legal practice are in tension.  Lawyers can be reluctant to change.  We were trained to be this way:  the doctrine of “stare decisis,” or “let the decision stand,” is a basic principle of our legal system.  Our system is built on centuries of precedent.  Blogs, although not new, are a deviation from the long history.  Additionally, lawyers are risk averse, and blogging raises certain risks.  Lawyers may not want to go on record interpreting the law in a way that might be inconsistent with a position desired by a future client.  And although blog posts are supposed to be short and sweet, legal analysis can resist such simplification.  Finally, the fact that lawyers write for a living cuts against blogging too:  when you write all day, the last thing you may want to do in your free time is write some more.

In this blog, we will strive to seize on the opportunities and work through the tension.  Some of the risks can be addressed by a disclaimer.  The content in this blog is not the opinion of SRVH.  As goes without saying, although we have quality controls, the entire firm cannot review each blog post before it is posted.  Such a process would grind a blog to a halt.  Next, we will be clear that the content in this blog is not legal advice.  Blog posts simply cannot be sufficiently individualized to constitute legal advice for the situation confronted any particular client.  For the same reason, this blog does not create an attorney-client relationship with the readers.  It is simply a source of generalized information.  Of course, our attorneys will not comment on pending cases or deals, and we will never disclose the confidences of our clients.

Our goal is to create 5 to 10 blog posts per month.  We hope to provide updates and analysis that are of interest to clients, prospective clients, and other attorneys.  As many of us are new to blogging, we expect that finding appropriate topics may be a challenge at first.  Building the blogging habit may also be difficult.  We ask you, the reader, to keep us honest.  Please engage with us through comments and emails.  Let us know what you like, and what we should address.

Welcome to the SRVH blog.

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