Your Online Writing Life: Protect Your Reputation — and Future (Part Five)

Recently, another blog­ger wrote about the inter­sec­tion between his real and online lives, in par­tic­u­lar his recent con­nec­tion via Face­book with a coworker. He declared that now his “writ­ing life and [ ] real life are the same thing.” That writer “works with lawyers.” He explained that, “beyond that, I don’t name the firm, the areas of law we work in, or the peo­ple at the firm, and espe­cially not the clients. Nei­ther my per­sonal blog nor my writ­ing blog deal with my Real Job.”

I also work with lawyers. That’s because I am a lawyer. Aside from men­tion­ing the area of law to which my prac­tice is devoted (labor law), I do not reveal any fur­ther details about my work.

I never write online about any of my busi­ness asso­ciates, the cases I han­dle, the appear­ances I make, nor do I blog about the law, save and except for the one case about which I have writ­ten fairly exten­sively to date: Con­ser­va­tor­ship of Wend­land. How­ever, that case was unique in that it pre­sented novel ques­tions of law and fact, attracted the atten­tion of the media around the world, and resulted in a con­tro­ver­sial deci­sion from the Cal­i­for­nia Supreme Court which con­cluded six years of lit­i­ga­tion. The gen­tle­man at the cen­ter of the debate died that sum­mer, before the Court announced its rul­ing, and my client died a cou­ple of years ago. If the case were still pend­ing, I would, of course, be eth­i­cally con­strained from writ­ing about it.

I can only remem­ber one occa­sion when I have spo­ken to any­one at the office about the fact that I main­tain a blog. That lim­ited con­ver­sa­tion was in the con­text of a news item about an indi­vid­ual who suf­fered severe pro­fes­sional con­se­quences as a result of his online activ­i­ties. I casu­ally men­tioned that I have a blog, but do not write about my busi­ness activ­i­ties. Frankly, no one seemed the least bit inter­ested in my blog — if they even knew what I was talk­ing about. No one asked any ques­tions about my site or requested the address. The dis­cus­sion segued into other top­ics and the sub­ject has never again been raised. It sim­ply does not come up within the con­text of my daily activ­i­ties, the per­sons with whom I inter­act or the sub­jects we broach in conversation.

I am a firm believer in the sep­a­ra­tion of busi­ness and plea­sure. Many years ago when a child­hood friend mar­ried a den­tist, sev­eral of our mutual friends found it odd that I did not become his patient. My ratio­nale was uncom­pli­cated: I did not want to see him socially, as well as in a pro­fes­sional set­ting and pre­dicted that if the lat­ter did not go well, the for­mer could become extremely uncom­fort­able. A cou­ple of our friends wish now that they had taken the same approach. My online activ­i­ties are sim­ply a hobby, a fun diver­sion from the grind of earn­ing a liv­ing by prac­tic­ing law. I main­tain a solid wall between the two, in part because blur­ring the line between them would spoil my enjoy­ment of writ­ing online and blog­ging. When I sit down in front of my com­puter here at home, I usu­ally want to think about any­thing and every­thing other than legal issues, what tran­spired at the office, my cowork­ers, etc. My pro­fes­sional endeav­ors are extremely stress­ful and demand­ing; I relax by leav­ing all of that at the office and writ­ing online about myr­iad other topics.

One blog­ger asked: “Would you be com­fort­able with every­one know­ing that you write, or are there peo­ple you would pre­fer to keep that a secret from?” Well, all of my col­leagues know that I “write” because writ­ing is a huge part of how I earn a liv­ing. In fact, before chang­ing the focus of my prac­tice a lit­tle over three months ago, I spent three years focus­ing, in part, on sig­nif­i­cant writ­ing projects. So my cowork­ers iden­tify me as a writer, acknowl­edg­ing and val­i­dat­ing my efforts.

But the writ­ing I do pro­fes­sion­ally is, as men­tioned above, far dif­fer­ent from what I do online. Again, that is by delib­er­ate design. Each indi­vid­ual has to decide what is right and works best for him/her, depend­ing upon his/her pro­fes­sion, the demands of his/her employer, etc. For me, I am hap­pi­est, most secure and at ease keep­ing my two worlds dis­crete and apart from each other.

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