Back to Work (That’s a Pun)

Posted on June 7th, 2010 by Tim Eavenson | 1 Comment »
Filed under: Housekeeping |

Photo by Venn Diagram (Flickr)

Hey, everybody! Long time! Good to see you again – you’re looking good. What do you think of the new digs?

Sorry to take up so much space on housekeeping matters. Now that I’ve got things pretty much how I want them design-wise, I wanted to dedicate one quick post to fill you in on my decisions about content. Then it’s back to business! I know all 3 of my regular readers are super-excited.

As I said earlier, I’ve been taking the past few months to figure out what I can and can’t do with the blog while working as a judicial clerk. This deliberation was partly because of the ethical issues involved in me pumping out posts on issues that may end up before my judge,¹ but that’s not the only thing that held me up. To be honest, the ethical stuff wasn’t that hard to work out: I’m going to eliminate any advice from my posts, obviously, but I can still write about cases and events (you know, “facts”), and I’ve always been careful not to get too personal or biased.

Once I really started thinking about it, though, I had another problem: there’s other stuff that I wanted to write about – things unrelated to substantive labor and employment law, having to do moreso with being a lawyer. I thought about starting a second blog, but that seemed stupid. God knows I hardly keep this one going; two blogs with no content is like two wallets with no money.

Plus, all the marketing and social media advice and blogs-about-blogs that I’d read said not to deviate from your site’s laser-focus, or you could destroy your online brand and lose credibility with your core demo.²

I went back and forth on this for too long, and then realized the following:

Right now, this isn’t actually my business. I’m not practicing, or trying to win clients, or market myself or anything; and
I didn’t start the blawg as a marketing tool! I actually wanted to add to the discourse, not just float a running advertisement for Tim, Employment Lawyer on the internet.

After these epiphanies, I decided that most of the people who read this site are lawyers, and I was probably over-thinking the whole damned thing and should just write whatever I felt like writing.

So that’s what I’m going to do. While the site will always be focused on employment law, when I need to fill in the gaps, I’m just going to write. About being a lawyer, especially a young lawyer.³ Or about being a dad lawyer. Or a lawyer with a blog and a Twitter account and a LinkedIn profile.

I am also planning on writing some (carefully-worded, fully approved) posts on being a judicial clerk; this job is giving me a front row seat to see how lawyers deal with judges and each other, and I don’t want to waste that vantage point.

So, there you go. Back to work – mine and everybody else’s.

Big boy posts start tomorrow.

~~ Footnotes ~~

While most employment litigation is federal, not all is. And some big employment issues, like noncompetes and wage-and-hour class actions, land in the Chancery Division, which is where I work. |↩|
Seriously, I worried about this. Re-reading it, I’m not sure I even know what I just wrote. |↩|
I passed the bar 2 years ago, and my entire perspective has changed. It takes some work to realize how wrong you are about what you think you know. |↩|