Friday, March 23, 2007 7:23 AM
Dennis Kennedy had a great quote in Computerworld this week in reaction to a story about [a] law firm in New Jersey [which] has temporarily halted plans to launch a blog because its insurance company would not cover the blog under an existing malpractice insurance policy. See Insurance company refuses to cover law firm's blog
In the article, Mr. Kennedy was quoted as saying these types of attempts to impose new restrictions on blogs likely occur 'when people aren't that familiar with the technology and think it is somehow completely new and different. Really blogs are just a form of Web pages. What you're doing is not different than if you are speaking in public or writing an op-ed piece.'
His point is well made. The idea that law firm's weblog is somehow completely different from its e-newsletter or its company website shows a lack of understanding of web technology. Perhaps the concern is how quickly the content can be syndicated worldwide. Yet, law firms send out e-newsletters everyday and often then post them on their websites. This content is then often picked up by "scraping" robots that grab, reformat and repurpose the content for other websites, in effect syndicating it to the world. The syndication process is much more clunky than that facilitated by RSS feeds, but the end result is the same.
Moreover, if there is a concern that somehow a law firm weblog will be a free-wheeling affair wherein anyone and everyone just randomly throws up their latest thought, that has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the business processes and policies in place at the firm. If a law firm starts a weblog and establishes a policy and process to govern postings to it, I echo Mr. Kennedy in wondering how this would be more risky than the other mailings, articles, speeches, quotes, etcetera that firm personnel make public everyday. Indeed, one could argue that a well-crafted policy and process underneath a law firm weblog is inherently less risky than the unfiltered interviews and speeches that firm lawyers regularly give.
We obviously don't know the full story behind the insurance company's rationale and perhaps it is simply taking a cautious approach to give itself time to understand weblogs and complete risk assessments, etcetera. For that I cannot blame them. They are running a business, after all. In the end, however, I doubt that attempting to classify weblogs the technology as somehow too risky to ensure will carry the day.
For more on the subject see Carolyn Elefant's post Warning: Blogging Can Render You Ineligible for Malpractice Insurance as well as Dennis Kennedy's No Malpractice Insurance for Law Firm Blogs?