On January 2, 2005, I launched Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog. It’s been quite a ride. Because of ABA TECHSHOW, I personally knew many of the law bloggers who were happy to share advice and tips. (Not that there were many lawyer bloggers at the time.)

But we were all experimenting. It is amazing how many of those early bloggers are still active and powerful influences today. Bob Ambrogi’s Law Sites Blog turned 17 this past November. His blog is *only* the top source today on legal technology news and it is still free to all readers. Carolyn Elefant’s My Shingle blog turned 17 last month. She is still a very active blogger, sharing her tips and opinions about solo and small firm law practice. Dennis Kennedy’s blog turns 17 next month. He is still an active blogger as evidenced by his post on his top posts of 2019. And many readers know that Ernie Svenson’s Ernie the Attorney blog was one of the earliest, launched on March 2, 2002. I’m happy to count all of these people as my friends. For more law blog history, see Bob Ambrogi’s Who Was the First Legal Blogger? 

One thing about law blogging is that many of these early blogs only lasted a short time. Blogging was, and is today, a time-consuming prospect if you do it well. And lawyers are busy people.

Luckily for me, my job as a practice management adviser with the Oklahoma Bar Association, provided me with “bloggable” material on a regular basis. And the fact I was trained as a journalist and adopted Dragon Naturally Speaking very early, allowed me to produce a lot of content. At one point, in addition to blogging, I was writing monthly columns on legal tech or practice management for three magazines, ABA’s Law Practice Magazine, ABA GPSOLO Magazine and the Oklahoma Bar Journal. So part of my blogging was posting links to my columns as they appeared online and to our Digital Edge podcasts. That helped with regular updates when I didn’t have to do an original post.

I’m proud of this aspect of my work and have really enjoyed it. It is certainly fun when I speak to groups out of state and audience members come up to me to tell me how long they have been reading the blog posts or listening to our podcasts. But it is hard to keep up anything at a high quality for 15 years. I experienced a lag a year or so ago when staff changes within my department and a huge one-time project at work kept me from consistent and quality blogging.

When the ABA and OBA updated their websites, it turned most of my links into dead links, which was a setback. Link rot is a problem across the Internet. But it was a challenging experience to have the majority of links go bad all within a short time and I still have several hours of work ahead reviewing every past post.

But 2019 was a big year for Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog. I migrated to the LexBlog platform and Kevin O’Keefe’s team at LexBlog provided masterful assistance helping me migrate from Typepad to their platform. (Kevin’s blog, Real Lawyers have Blogs, is also in its seventeenth year.) Working with those great people and seeing my blog with a clean, more modern look has been inspiring, so my blog posts picked up in 2019.

2020 will be an even better year, I predict. There are so many things going on in the legal tech world. And, at some point in 2019, I’m going to start with “semi-regular” video blog postings.

Thanks for reading, my friends, and share the blog info with your friends.