Kevin O'Keefe is the President and founder of LexBlog, the leading provider of marketing blogs to lawyers and other professional service firms and he has written a very important post here which I will now make reference to.
The problem is that last week a federal grand jury indicted Milberg Weiss, a leading american law firm for allegedly participating in a scheme that paid out more than $11 million in illegal kickbacks to plaintiffs.
As Kevin writes "That's old news. We're now beginning to see an onslaught of blog posts about the indictment from lawyers, journalists and the like.
Just look at the increase in blog posts about Milberg Weis being tracked by Technorati this last week." (These numbers have continued to rise since)
With respect to damage limitation, as Kevin writes:
"Blogs are perfect for 'one to many' damage control. Just read some of the stories on corporate blogs told by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book, Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Their Naked Conversations blog is full of many more.
If Milberg Weiss thinks they can control the PR spin with traditional press releases and responses to media inquiries, they're nuts. They need a blog to clearly communicate their position on various matters and allegations as well as to respond to reports by bloggers and journalists."
However, as Kevin writes it is extremely unlikely that Milberg Weiss will launch a blog.
"Will Milberg Weiss launch a blog? Probably not. They'll have expensive PR people working on things who do not have a clue about using blogs for damage control. They'll have traditional lawyers who will be scared to death of innovative communication tools like blogs."
Some other observations:
1 It took until 22nd May for the firm to release a press statement on its website regarding the indictment - That is an eternity on the web.
2 Generally speaking, despite being very well paid, leading PR companies are out of touch with blogging - If there is one industry that is going to be changed by blogging, it is PR.
3 With my UK hat on, in light of the fact that there are less than 20 blogs done by lawyers, you are hardly going to see the UK legal profession embracing blogging as a PR tool. The UK is light years behind the USA for law blogs.