Back To Blogging

Well, that was a nice month away.

Sorry for the extended respite from my commentaries (I'm pretty sure all three of my fans were struggling badly without me). But the last month included a nice vacation and not-so-nice busy times at work. Besides, I was wondering whether to return to the blogosphere -- everyone seems to have a blog now, and I'm not particularly excited enough by anything going on to blog about it, my alma mater's valiant effort in the NCAA tournament notwithstanding.

But something convinced me to return -- something sent to me by my father-in-law. This article in the Wall Street Journal discusses lawyers and blogging, and how we're making a great contribution to society... okay, just kidding. Basically, it reveals that we lawyers-turned-bloggers are little more than frustrated writers... which absolutely the case for yours truly. Too bad the picture for making a living as a writer is so bleak...

Each year thousands of otherwise perfectly normal college graduates with perfectly worthless degrees in the humanities venture into law school in the hope of landing a paying job that requires no science and little math. Many have been encouraged by college counselors who have told them that law school will "keep their options open"--code for delaying the inevitable for another three years--and it pays better than academia.

Law schools feed this myth because they need paying customers, even as the members of their own faculty are refugees from the very firms to which they are sending their students. Upon graduation, however, many students find that the entry-level jobs they get are little more than glorified secretarial positions. Sure, they pay well, but how many paper clips can you remove from a stack of documents before you start questioning your entire existence?

In the dark hours, writing seems like a natural escape. It's what most lawyers do (when they're not reviewing documents), and though blogging is very different from drafting a prospectus, it's close enough to fool many lawyers into trading one form of verbiage for another. Writing a blog can also be done in secret, on your own time (or during office hours if you're careful), and it is potentially lucrative (if you can get some ads or make a name for yourself). For many lawyers, writing is also their true love, a dream they had before financial concerns and parental pressure drove them into drudgery. Some turn to nonfiction, hoping to transform their legal meanderings into punditry. Others (myself included) seek to channel their inner McInerney by penning the next great American novel, or at least a best seller.

We should applaud their efforts to escape a profession that has one of the lowest levels of job satisfaction. If money is the goal, though, these lawyers might be more successful if they played the lottery. Legal-thriller writer Lisa Scottoline once told me that she wrote her first book as a way to earn some money following a divorce. She succeeded in spite of her naiveté. Most writers will not see a cent from their efforts. Those who do will quickly realize that they cannot survive on books alone. Instead, law will pay their bills while they toil in obscurity, learning a cold, cruel lesson about the realities of the publishing industry: It takes more than a cup of coffee and a laptop to write a good book.

I guess that last paragraph explains my regular purchase of Powerball tickets.

Funny thought, though. I recognized the name of the author, Cameron Stracher, from way back in my past. His book, "Double Billing", appeared in my student mailbox during my first year of law school, free of charge. How did he go from giving away copies of his book to law students to success? It sounds like he went back to the law.

Back to work, I guess.