Looking to ramp up your book of business? You could try to ramp it up the old fashioned way, do some lunches with your current clients, start networking with old law-school buddies, think about dabbling in IP work. Or — it is 2010 — you could start a blog.

On its surface, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. You’re generally up to speed on the area in which you practice — and send out periodic memos to your existing clients anyway. Why not just put it on the Web and build a following? It’ll be cheap, and how time consuming could it be? No less time consuming than endless (and fruitless) lunches with people you haven’t seen since the tech boom.

Okay, so, if you’ve come this far in your thinking, stop. Just stop and breathe. Then, before you’ve typed the word “blogspot” anywhere, read this article in the ABA’s Litigation publication.

The article, nominally meant to provide a how-to to lawyers thinking about launching a blog, actually provides a cautionary tale of sorts on lawyer blogging. It’s written by Mark Herrmann, the former writer and founder of one of the better blogs ever written by a practicing lawyers — the Drug and Device Law Blog. Hermann hung up his keyboard in December, around the time he announced he was leaving Jones Day to become the chief litigation counsel at Aon Corp. (The blog still exists, maintained by its co-founder, Dechert’s Jim Beck, and a handful of other Dechert lawyers.)

via Lawyers, Looking to Launch a Blog? Read This First – Law Blog – WSJ.