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I have been on parental leave for two years now. Since then, I didn’t practice any law for my law firm, but I blogged a bit, and then I stopped blogging altogether in the summer of 2022.
I may or may not practice law in a private practice setting again. I haven’t decided. For now, I will stay on parental leave from my private practice indefinitely and work on some side projects.
Regarding blogging on this domain, I will carry on, but not exclusively in my niche anymore. I am not motivated by employment law anymore.
First, the employment law blogging industry has changed, and I don’t see a future for me in it. One competitor has begun to exert near-total dominance in the niche, and I see no way to compete without hiring an army of content creators. Credit to them for their blogging innovations.
Second, when I started blogging, four or five firms were consistently blogging and trying to compete for eyeballs in the Ontario employment law niche. Now there are literally hundreds of firms blogging about the same topics here in Ontario. I realized writing another blog post about “severance in Ontario” isn’t worth the same effort it once was. How many blog posts about severance does society need?
At the same time, writing about “severance in Ontario” has become boring after you’ve done it as much as I have. Unfortunately, I’m siloed into this kind of post. There is no point writing an interesting commentary about some recent case with a particular twist about motion procedure, for example, because relatively no one googles those topics. The only people that read posts like that are lawyers doing research on that case years later. You have to blog for clients, not lawyers, if you want to attracts lots of clients. Credit to all the legal bloggers who blog for passion on interesting topics that lawyers rely on for research, but that wasn’t me. All I cared about was traffic.
Third, I lost motivation because I didn’t care about winning arbitrary milestones anymore. Once I hit 100 visitors in the early days, I was ecstatic and addicted. I wanted to keep going so badly. Same with 1,000 visitors, and again with 1,000,000 visitors (I bought myself balloons). Now I have almost 4 million visitors, and the next milestone, ten million visitors, doesn’t motivate me as the first one hundred visitors did seven years ago. I feel like the only next milestone I would care about is 100 million or a billion visitors, but that’s not realistic for a firm of my size.
Fourth, it’s hard to move the needle when you get up to around 100,000 visitors per month. One extra blog post will not do much for the number of callers our law firm receives. As a competitor proved, there needs to be some kind of innovation to scale your blog once you hit those numbers.
I created an unrelated TikTok account last summer, which was eye-opening. I was able to get millions of views in literally months. Meanwhile, it took this blog years to get to one million views. This leads me to believe that written blogging has a much darker future than when I started. On the other hand, the future is bright in short-form video.
Lastly, AI is the real deal. The latest Chat GPT release (4.0) writes insane blog posts (if you prompt and trim well). This will be very problematic for law firms in my niche because there will soon be so much more competition on Google. It takes five minutes to write a passable blog post with Chat GPT 4.0. It used to take a few hours to do the same task. Law firms will begin posting a few AI-written blog posts per day in the next year, or they will die on Google.
One of the side projects I am working on is a Open AI API-powered blog prompter to make amazing legal blogs. I am going to train it to cut out the BS, recall the actual law (which it knows) better, improve on-page SEO and speak more like a lawyer.
Already I am at a stage in my model that it will take a simple hyperlink to a CanLII case and output out a 2/10 blog post about the case. When it gets it to 7/10 it will be slightly better (for Google) than most blog posts made by human lawyers and far better than posts written by Fiverr writers that more and more law firms are using.
I don’t care about revealing my “great idea” because its not actually innovative. Companies have been trying to summarize caselaw with AI for a while now and there are a hundred startups popping up monthly trying to do approximately the same thing.
If I don’t succeed on this project someone else will, and its going to be mind blowing.
Maybe you are a nay-sayer about AI, but eventually you will be proven wrong. Its not a flash in the pan.
Still, there’s no reason to abandon my blog. It does well on Google, and it would be a mistake not to monetize it.
Hence, I’ve decided to convert this blog into a content site (with ads), leveraging AI. I am going to call it Dutton’s Law. I do not know what niche it will land in, but it will be interesting experimenting with it. 99% of the posts will be AI-written (with human editing – it wont just be spam and search engine gaming).
And on that note, I will be leaving Monkhouse Law. I wish them well!
A final note to lawyers considering opening a law firm: Do it! Get a WordPress law firm template and start using AI to blog several daily posts about your area of law. At the same time, make TikTok videos about your area of law with keywords in your description, including your jurisdiction name (i.e. “Ontario”) as a hashtag. All you need is an iPhone and a tripod to get millions of views by the end of the year.
A percent of your traffic will convert into clients.
Jeff is an employment lawyer in Toronto. Jeff is a frequent lecturer on employment law and is the author of an employment law textbook and various trade journal articles.
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