Practice area topics of law firm blogs

This post looks at the topics of the blogs described previously. Recall that forty-nine large US law firms host one or more blogs. When you categorize those blogs by substantive legal practice area, you find the distribution shown in the plot below.

With 30 of the blogs focused on it, by far the dominant practice area is employment law. Why? Because every corporate client (or hoped for client) has at least one employee, because a bewildering array of Federal, state, and local laws and regulations complicate employment arrangements, and because it mixes counseling and litigation.

Next comes litigation, with a score of blogs addressing that practice area. Some treat the topic generally; others pick portions of the broad litigation spectrum, such as appellate practice or class actions.

Third comes intellectual property. Like employees, all corporate clients (or prospective clients) have intellectual property. Whether they seek to patent it, copyright it, trademark it, or cloak it with trade secret measures, there is fertile opportunity for law firms.