A few days ago, I lamented the poor state of Chicago-based criminal defense blogs. As I hoped, a few local lawyers spotted it and spoke up.
The first one was Chicago divorce lawyer Maria Fahnert. Not what I’m looking for, but since she was nice enough to leave a comment—and wasn’t obviously just marketing herself—I thought I’d mention her.
The second response came out of a law office I mentioned in my previous post. I had poked fun at the criminal defense blog of Anthony W. Hill because the most recent post read, in it’s entirety,
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This brought an email from David Hill, who’s helping Anthony set up his web site. As I suspected when I wrote my original post, I caught him testing the blogging engine and template layout.
Most of the website for the law office already existed, so David set up a WordPress blog template that mimics the main website look-and-feel, then tucked it right into the site. You can see the template change when you know to look for it, but it doesn’t disrupt user navigation. David and Anthony expect the blog to make it easier to update site content regularly, which they hope will attract visitors and search bots.
I’m not usually too excited about blogs that are obviously designed as marketing tools, but it’s a good sign that the website and blog are homebrewed. It suggests that the lawyer believes in the idea and didn’t simply purchase a blog from a company that’s selling lawyers on the idea of blogging as a marketing tool. I’ll be checking them out when they go live.
David himself just graduated law school himself, and he’s got his own blog where he talks about legal stuff.
Finally, I drew a comment from Rob Deters, a genuine Chicago criminal defense blawger…who let his blog die out last December. He says he’s going to post more. We’ve all been there.
Rob apparently reads my blog (it’s always a little disturbing to encounter people who read my work regularly) and he says he does criminal defense work for pretty much all the same reasons it scares me: He loves thinking fast on his feet in court, and he likes a lot of his clients.
Rob’s a second-generation criminal defense lawyer who came to Chicago a few years ago and ended up at one of the small law firms near the Cook County Criminal Courthouse and county lockup at 26th and California. (The top of his blog has a picture of the top of the courthouse.) Rob does about 80% criminal work including DUI, resisting, possession, and one homicide trial.
In addition to blogging, Rob has also published a few opinion pieces in newspapers. For example, I’m pretty sure he’s the same Rob Deters who wrote this piece on congressional disregard for judges, so you can see what he looks like.
I just noticed that as I was writing this, Rob posted some new stuff on his blog, the 26th St. Bar Association. I wonder if my post goaded him into it. Maybe I’m inspiring our nation’s youth.
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That’s hilarious.