Set in Style

So, you’ve earned your J.D., and you’re going to be a lawyer. Good for you.

Let me give you a bit of advice — before you go to work, get a copy of a small book packed full of invaluable advice: The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law.

Written by Mark Herrmann, the Guide covers a range of topics that aren’t covered in law school: how to work with a secretary . . . err . . . administrative assistant: how to take a deposition; how to please clients . . . . In short, the Guide covers many of the secrets to a new (or any) lawyer’s success.

Heck! You’ve been an attorney for some years, and now you’re working on your first appellate case. You’re getting ready to write the merits brief. Before you do, stop! Get a copy of the Guide and read Chapter 1: How to Write.

It could make all the difference.

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Here’s a curious site that is “sponsored by a few lawyers that [sic] are actively involved in internet marketing and web development.” They plan to provide “articles about marketing you [sic] law firm on the web.”

David Lluis  the Los Angeles attorney who operates (or doesn’t) the site claims to “have internet strategist who assist in promoting and advancing your internet presence.”

He is also developing (or not) a legal blog network “which [sic] allows for not only a [sic] easier system for the internet [sic] public to find legal information relevant to them [sic], but also for law firms and legal service providers to advertise and promote their online businesses.”

Lluis also operates the Explain Law Legal Network.

In the previous four parts to this post, we looked at various measures of the popularity of some law firm blogs. We examined their Alexa rankings, which indicate how much traffic they get. We examined their Technorati rankings, which indicate how popular they are. And we looked at their Blog Reactions, which tell us how many other blogs link to them.

And we considered the correlation betweeen Alexa ranking, Technorati ranking, and Blog Reactions.

We found some blogs for which the numbers just don’t make sense. Consider the following table in which blogs are listed according to their Alexa rank:

The numbers look pretty good until we get down to the Arkansas Business Litigation blog. That blog gets less traffic than Set in Style, but it’s more popular! It has a better Technorati rank, and twice as many reactions.

Compare the numbers for the Aviation & Airport Development Law blog to those of the new legal writer. The former gets much less traffic than the latter, but it has a better Technorati rank, and more reactions.

How can this be?

To find the answer, let’s take a look at the source of the reactions to the Arkansas Business Litigation blog, which hasn’t had a new post in over a month.

Here are some of the blogs that link to it:

Aviation and Airport Development Law
Real Lawyers Have Blogs
Boston Estate Planning and Probate Law
Chicago Nursing Home Lawyer
South Carolina Family Law
North Texas Family Law Blog
Greater Houston Criminal Defense Law

And here are some of the blogs that link to the Aviation & Airport Development Law blog.

Arkansas Business Litigation Blog
Real Lawyers Have Blogs
Boston Estate Planning and Probate Law
Chicago Nursing Home Lawyer
South Carolina Family Law
North Texas Family Law Blog
Greater Houston Criminal Defense Law

And all of those blogs link to Sheppard & Mullins’ China Law Update!

What we have here is a link-sharing arrangement — “You link to my blog, and I’ll link to yours. That way, we’ll both seem more popular than we are.”

This raises some questions –

1. Does this arrangement accomplish anything? 
2. Does it violate any ethics rules?
3. How is it that some blogs hosted by solo practitioners (of things like divorce law and DUI defense) are far more popular than a blog hosted by some great big law firm?

That’s the title to a recent post at the Tampa Injury Law blog.

Those are the sorts of questions raised in a suit filed by Philip J. Berg, an attorney and host of Obama Crimes.

Barack Obama claims he was born in Hawaii, but Berg says that ain’t so — he was born in Kenya, so he’s not a natural born citizen and he can’t become president.

This past Friday, Berg’s suit was dismissed for lack of standing.

Earlier this month, another suit challenging John McCain’s status as a natural born citizen was dismissed for lack of standing.

Christopher G. Foster, an attorney with Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck — a firm that boasts “you can rest assured that you’re being represented by a team of seasoned attorneys with the knowledge, relationships and legal skills to help you mitigate even the most complex environmental risk” — claims wood is a fossil fuel! Here’s the intro of an alert authored by Foster:

California recently enacted a landmark global warming law, Assembly Bill 32 (AB32), whose goals were to establish state-wide programs designed to combat greenhouse gases and promote the development and use of energy-efficient technologies. Carbon dioxide is the main focus of AB32. Carbon dioxide is produced by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, petroleum, natural gas, or wood, and is discharged primarily from exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks. Because greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to the use of energy, measures designed to conserve energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions are key, but surely not the entire picture.

____________

An editor could have prevented this error from being published, and that would have helped sell potential clients on the notion that the firm’s attorneys know their stuff (rather than suggesting they believe that most of the carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere comes from exhaust pipes and smokestacks.)

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UPDATE: The firm might need an editor just to monitor Foster’s correspondence. This is from an e-mail he sent me when I brought the wood-is-fossil-fuel error to his attention — “Gee, I wus just looking for someone to help me with my speling. If I needs help edting I’ll ne sur to call.”

Some of the language in Foster’s emails is pretty foul — not the sort of language I’d expect from someone who studied at Stanford.

Rutledge & Yaghmai — a small law firm in Anniston, Alabama — is doing something weird: it’s hosting a blog — FORT MCCLELLAN LITIGATION – to promote a lawsuit: The City of Annitson Alabama et al v. Honarable Joel E. Laird.

The dispute is about who has the authority to develop the site of a former army base — the City of Anniston, or the County of Calhoun.

According to the blog:

One does not have to be a lawyer or even a very smart person to know that state judges cannot tell the United States Department of Defense how to exercise the authority granted to it by federal statutes. Everyone who has attended school knows that the federal government is supreme and the state governments are subordinate. The current mess at Fort McClellan comes from the failure of those who should know better to observe this basic principle of federalism.

The Anninston Star — the local paper — has been critical. It ran this editorial about the blog, which noted:

It appears a law firm hired by the city of Anniston to wrest control of McClellan from the Calhoun County Commission has its own blog dedicated to the matter.

No one from the city or the law firm of Rutledge & Yaghmai will claim ownership. Yet it seems clear that if someone else were misusing a law firm’s name, then the attorneys would put a stop to it.

The blog’s author, regardless of who it is, has chosen this newspaper as one of its targets. It complains that the city’s side of the story isn’t getting out; oddly enough, neither city officials nor the hired-gun attorneys will say much on the record about potential litigation.

Here’s the deal. Rutledge & Yaghmai received $30,000 of taxpayer money for 20 days’ work in September, and the clock is still ticking.

Apparently, part of that legal bill includes time spent bashing the local newspaper. If so, the city made a poor fiscal decision. We can find scores of folks who will criticize The Anniston Star for free.

So, what’s the relationship between the North Texas Family Law Blog, the Greater Houston Criminal Defense Law Blog, and Sheppard & Mullins’ China Law Update?

Odd as it is, the family and defense law blogs link to Sheppard & Mullins’ blog.

Why?

Ratings. That’s why.

And that’s why so many other blogs (like those listed below) also link to China Law Update:

• Alabama Family Law
• Arkansas Business Litigation 
• Aviation & Airport Development Law 
• Chicago Family Law
• Connecticut Employment Law
• Denver Criminal Attorney Law
• Employee Benefits Law
• ERISA & Disability Benefits Law
• Florida Probate & Trust Litigation
• Florida Workers’ Compensation Law

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Compare Set in Style (Alexa rank = 2,661,000) to the ERISA & Disability Benefits Law blog (Alexa rank = 11,424,800). According to Technorati, the latter (Technorati rank = 225,000) is much more popular than the former (Technorati rank = 553,500), even though the former (Set in Style) gets much more traffic than the latter (the ERISA & Disability Benefits Law blog).

And the other blogs (there are quite a few of them) that link to Sheppard & Mullins’ China Law Update also have Technorati ranks that don’t jibe with the amount of traffic they get.

In other words, the numbers don’t add up. The ratings of China Law Update (Alexa rank = 12,288,567) and the many blogs that link to it aren’t bona fide.

That’s it for now. In an upcoming post, we’ll examine this further, and we’ll consider why so many blogs that have nothing at all to do with China or doing business in China or the law in China have links to Sheppard & Mullins’ China Law Update.

This discussion began with this question — what’s the relationship between the North Texas Family Law Blog, the Greater Houston Criminal Defense Law Blog, and Shepphard & Mullins’ China Law Update?

I’m getting to that. But, first, I want you to consider another blog of sorts. It’s the Frugal Law Student. The site has an Alexa rank of 155,000, a Technorati rank of 58,000, and over 250 blog reactions.

Based on those numbers, the site is very popular; it has a Technorati rank not far from that of the Volokh Conspiracy.

Now, look at the comments to the site’s top post – Why Every Law Student Should Blog. There are over 80 comments, and that’s a very impressive number.

Then see who made those comments. Here are a few of the (so called) authors:

• Coral Snake
• Eve Isk
• Genesis Bible
• Vanguard Mutual Fund
• Credit Report Australia

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In yesterday’s post, I discussed two rating services — Alexa (for Web sites) and Technorati (for blogs).

Let’s consider how they come up with those numbers (rankings) that tell us how popular is a blog or a Web site.

Alexa rankings are based on how many people visit a Web site, and how many pages they view at the site. The data is collected from people who’ve installed the Alexa Toolbar in their browsers, and “from other, diverse traffic data sources.” Says Alexa, the data “is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.”

According to Alexa, the most popular sites are Yahoo, Google, and YouTube.

Technorati rankings are not based on how many people visit a blog, nor on how many posts they view at the blog. Instead, a blog’s rank is based on blog reactions – i.e., how many other blogs linked to it in the past six months.

I just checked the most popular blog of all — The Huffington Post. It has over 300,000 blog reactions. The Volokh Conspiracy has over 15,000, Set in Style has 32, and Sheppard & Mullins’ China Business Law blog has 11 blog reactions.

There is no direct correlation between a blog’s Alexa rank and its Technorati rank, but a blog that many visit is likely to have more blog reactions than a site that few visit. For instance, The Huffington Post has an Alexa rank of 630, and a Technorati rank of 1, while The Volokh Conspiracy has an Alexa rank of 52,000, and a Technorati rank of 413.
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