Earlier this year I welcomed Ben Cowgill’s Legal Ethics blog to the blogosphere. Now there has been a troubling development in Ben’s home state of Kentucky. It seems that the Kentucky Attorneys’ Advertising Commission wants to classify his blog as advertising, requiring him to do a filing and pay a $50 fee every time he does a post. As Ben notes, there’s been a whirlwind of commentary on the web about this and even BusinessWeek has covered it. Let’s hope things work out where Kentucky isn’t the only state to effectively ban lawyer blogging.
In other states, just in June alone, Rhode Island’s Annual Meeting had a program which featured a live blog posting, lawyers attending Missouri’s excellent Solo and Small Firm Conference heard from a couple of bloggers about blogs (and other things) and Oklahoma’s Solo and Small Firm Conference will feature a program "Blogs – Using Them and Building Them" from me and Tulsa County Special District Judge Charles Hogshead on June 24.