The announced demise of the Concurring Opinions Blog, once a mainstay of law professor blogs, has got me (and many others) thinking about the value (or not) of law professor blogging. Some believe the era of the law professor blog is over, cannibalized at the one end by mircoblogging on Twitter and on the other end by the rise of shorter online pieces in law reviews.
I started this blog in 2012 with the idea of producing "practice ready scholarship." The idea was that a law professor blog could be fully committed to the creation of new knowledge and the communication of that knowledge to those who could use it in a form they could use it. Here is an excerpt from what I wrote then in my very first post.
I have started this blog based on the conviction that there is a need for law professors, especially in corporate law, corporate finance, and M&A, to devote more resources toward producing practice-ready scholarship.
By “practice-ready scholarship,” I mean scholarly research that has the potential to influence the practical aspects of transactional law practice. Both parts of the term are important. I plan to focus on research that is “practice ready” in the sense that it can have a tangible impact on legal practice at the concrete, rather than merely an abstract or theoretical level. On the other hand I plan to focus on work that is “scholarship” in the sense that it aims to generate new knowledge rather than merely summarizing doctrine or recapitulating existing information. Ultimately, the hope is that this blog will be a small contribution toward bridging the gulf between law schools and lawyers in transactional practices.
I see quantitative academic scholarship as uniquely positioned to provide valuable information to the bench and bar that is otherwise unavailable. I believe that insights from empirical analysis of deals are desperately needed by practitioners. I also believe that law professors have a comparative advantage in performing this empirical analysis because practitioners lack the incentives, time, and inclination to collect, analyze, and report on data for a public audience. Equally important is the existence of a forum to translate these theoretical and empirical insights into terms that can be directly applied by practitioners. The typical transactional lawyer often needs quick answers and cannot persuade clients to pay them to read 60-page law review articles to indulge the lawyer’s intellectual curiosity.
I started this blog with the hope of providing a forum to bridge the gap between scholarly inquiry and practice—especially transactional practice in corporate law, corporate finance, and M&A, where I practiced myself. This blog is designed to communicate useful results from my own original research in progress, as well as commenting on insights from other academics’ research that might otherwise be overlooked by busy practitioners. The goal, overall, is to bring data and theory to practice, without sacrificing either scholarly rigor or practical usefulness.
One of the problems with group blogs is that they often eventually devolve into a single active author, reducing the volume of posts below the point where they keep readers coming back. Yes, readers will follow links from aggregator blogs to interesting material (at least when aggregator blogs don't Control-C Control-V the entire content--the business model for some blogs). But I don't want to recycle (steal?) other people's content; I want to create new content. And readers won't keep visiting a blog if they don't get new content at least 50% of the days they visit the site. WITNESSETH has always been a single author blog, so there have been times when the volume of posts has dropped too low to sustain readership.
I have reflected on my own blogging experience and determined that there is a continued need for what I provide here at WITNESSETH. As a result, I am committing myself in an early new year's resolution to at least one post every day to keep people coming back. If I were rewriting my original "launch" post today, I would have included my commentary on law schools, the law profession, and legal technology along with transactional law and M&A as my points of focus. That's what this blog will provide starting now and through 2019. I would like to try to more effectively realize my original goal of creating and communicating practice-ready scholarship of my own and publicizing that of others. I hope this will translate into increased reader engagement in 2019 and beyond.