Legal scholarship changed forever with the advent of legal blogging.

This change is a gift to practicing lawyers, law firms and legal marketing professionals.

Rather than view legal blogging as a traffic generator and marketing tool alone, view blogging as legal scholarship, something much more powerful than web traffic.

Legal scholarship had long been the bastion of legal academics – law professors.

The problem with law professors shaping the law, as Mark Cohen, CEO of Legal Mosaic, penned a while back, is that many professors have never practiced law.

“…[W]hy do law school professors have a stranglehold on legal scholarship? What about leading practitioners who help shape the law? And what about legal entrepreneurs who are reengineering the structures and methods by which legal services are being delivered?

And why are legal thought leaders not deemed to be engaged in legal scholarship when they explain-sometimes demystify-the legal ecosystem to law students, lawyers, and the general public? Why are these individuals, many of whom have drawn their scholarship from first-hand experience-not secondary sources-not considered legal scholars by the Academy? After all, was it not lawyers who decreed that hearsay is generally inadmissible? So much of what passes for legal scholarship is hearsay because so little of it has been derived from first-hand experience?”

Enter legal blogging. Legal practitioners are contributing to, and shaping the law.

The law shaped and relied upon by judges, legislative bodies, other lawyers and the public.

Legal scholarship, of course, as secondary law, but also legal scholarship that shapes primary law in the form of codes/statutes, case law and administrative law.

The lawyers contributing to this legal scholarship, not in the form of a blog post here and there for web traffic, but as legal insight contributed via blog posts over their career develop stature and unequaled reputations.