The power of legal blogs

The Daily Court Review today has this story, entitled “Hobby Turns Into Project To Track Lawyers’ Blogs And Their Impact,” which discusses the taxonomy of legal blogs being developed by OSU’s own Ian Best at 3L Epiphany.  Here is a snippet:

Best says the best feature of the multitude of legal blogs is how research is presented.  Legal journals, he said, tend to be more static while the legal blogs are more interactive, making it easier to learn from.  He discovered, for instance, that not only attorneys and judges were reading [Douglas Berman’s] blog about sentencing guidelines.  “Criminal defendants and victims were reading his blog,” Best said. “They’re not going to pick up a law journal. But they can read this and learn how this applies to their situation. This moves away from the ivory tower.”…

Though the notoriety blogging has received is recent, Best said what it could achieve for the legal profession and mass communication is a broader audience and a more educated public. “It’s all online and it’s a superior way of doing it,” he said.  “That’ll be an outreach to the public.  Legal blogs have a real potential that can be transformed.”