The blogs I follow — such as Defending People and Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice — reflect the very distinctive voices of their authors. If a ghostwriter were able to imitate this distinctive voice, would it matter to me that the entry was written by a ghostwriter and not, say, Scott Greenfield?

They say that, by the end, JFK’s ghostwriter Ted Sorensen sounded more like JFK than JFK himself. Sorensen wrote in his autobiography that he himself cannot remember which of JFK’s famous lines were penned by him and which were written by JFK. If Sorensen can’t remember and doesn’t seem to care, why should we?

For example, if you had a “blog” set up with general information articles about criminal defense law — not opinions or legal discussions, but just plain old info, and it was written by a ghostwriter but was factually correct, I don’t see the problem. If you hired someone to ghostwrite a blog like your Defending People blog, that I would take issue with.

The former is common in the personal injury world. I’ve had dozens of personal injury firms call me and say “We’d like to hire you to write a series of articles for our blog about our practice areas.” What they mean is, they want general information articles for a website that is set up on WordPress. The content would be well researched, fact-checked, and reviewed by the lawyers before being posted to the site. I stopped accepting jobs like that, but not for ethical reasons.

Just curious where the lines are drawn. As a paralegal, I worked for lawyers who couldn’t manage to write their own bios without getting at least two staff members involved. So I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that every lawyer is going to have the skill or time to write all of his own web content.

Most lawyers wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to the ethics of ghostblogging; the sad truth is that most lawyers don’t give a moment’s thought to the ethics of anything.

They don’t, but they should. If hiring a ghostblogger is unethical, not considering its ramifications doesn’t make it ethical.

While I agree with the integrity/ethical debate behind not outsourcing certain things, I am not convinced it always matters with blogging. Here’s why: Not all lawyers understand blogging well enough to know that it doesn’t need to be done.

I’m talking about the ones who don’t use blogs as a personal professional platform; they use them as websites. They look at blogging as nothing more than “Hey! This technology is easier to post articles to on a regular basis.” These aren’t the types of articles they sign their name to as a blog post would be (in modern blawgworld), but more like general information articles one would find on a website.

I wouldn’t consider this “ghostblogging” any more than I would consider it “ghostwriting” if a lawyer were to hire someone to write the copy/content of his website. I’ve worked for a lot of lawyers, and not all of them are excellent writers. Not all of them could type, either — but that’s a different tangent for another day.

Is it morally wrong — or professionally unethical — for a lawyer to hire someone to do something they feel needs to be done, but that they can’t do well or don’t have the time to do? Are we bad parents because we have a nanny? (Not the same, I know. But it’s midnight, and I’m tired.)

I think the problem is that these types of folks shouldn’t be blogging in the first place, but they’ve been convinced by the hypesters that blogging will get them business. Similar to the way people who think flinging up SEO articles will get them business, and the way people think spamming blog comments will increase their page rank…. ugh! There are many many idiots doing a lot of things I don’t understand. (How some of these folks passed the bar, I would love to know, but I digress.)

I did blog consulting for a few years, and one of the reasons I didn’t make a great deal of money at it and eventually went back to legal assistant work is that I began each call by asking people why they thought they needed to do this; I talked most of them out of it. I don’t have what it takes to be a “guru.”

As a freelance writer, I have written web copy and content for lawyer websites. I have also contributed to multi-author “law blogs” that weren’t really blogs, in my opinion, so much as websites. My name was on them, so I’m not sure that’s classified as “ghostblogging.” If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t go back and do that type of work again — it was a waste of time. Were the lawyers I did the work for unethical? I honestly don’t think so. I think they just had it in their heads that they should try this latest new thing, and that’s as far as it went.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m naive or uninformed, because I’m not a lawyer. I’m relatively young and still learning. I’m not saying I think it’s a good idea, only that I understand it from a different view point. I’ve spent countless hours trying to talk people out of this stuff. Seriously. Most of them aren’t bad people. They just don’t know any better. Does that make it ok? I dunno… I’ve made my share of mistakes.

I think it was Scott (maybe?) who posted a while back about chatting with a group of lawyers at a conference or event and realizing most of them will never see this stuff? That’s kind of how I view this problem. World’s apart. The commute would be a full-time job, and you’d still never get through. Trust me. I’ve tried.