Update 09/16/2011:
I wanted to do a mea culpa on this post and admit that I am young (31), just starting out as a solo lawyer, and you should probably take everything I say on this blog with a grain of salt.
I have almost 4 years of practicing experience under my belt but it isn’t enough. As I said in another post, if you are going to start a law firm out of law school or without doing much work as a practicing lawyer previously, you should get more legal experience. Every bar association in the country has a mentoring program. If you lack experience, I would recommend a mentor. I have done a poor job at times being an attorney and it wasn’t due to lack of desire, it was due to lack of experience. We have people’s lives in our hands and we need to take that responsibility very, very seriously.
As some of you may notice, I started blogging over a month ago in an effort to document my efforts to start a law firm. I have the concept: start a firm in Minnesota once I am licensed there and blog about how I am doing it. I plan to talk about the process, the trials and tribulations, my successes, and my failures. All fairly started stuff.
The problem is that I am trying to write the blog for another very important reason – I want to generate search engine optimization so my future clients can easily find me by doing a google, bing, or other search on a search engine. The more I blog, the more traffic I get. The more traffic I get on this blog the more likely somebody needing a divorce or family law attorney will find me. Ok, that all makes sense.
But, is it ethical? I am not licensed in Minnesota. Doesn’t the name of my blog suggest a possible ethical conflict when I am not licensed in Minnesota? What if a potential client thinks I am making representations that I am licensed? This is all scary for me. I’ve included several posts and a legal disclaimer at the bottom of the page about my licensure status.
So, I’ve realized that I need to be very clear that I am blogging about starting a family law firm. That is what this blog is about. I also probably need to change the name to “starting” or some other moniker. It’s not about practicing in Minnesota because I am not licensed there and I don’t want to make any inference to any reader that I am.
I think this post is important because I think a lot of young entrepreneurs like myself who are savvy with social media, need to be aware of the ethical constraints of blogging. I just read a really interesting (and somewhat scary) in the Indiana Bar Association magazine about the ethical issues surrounding social networking and social media for lawyers. The point is that I need to be careful about what it is I am actually blogging about, and that is starting and building a law firm.