So asks Kevin from LexBlog in a post here.  It's tempting to dismiss Kevin's post as taking Kool-Aid consumption to the next level.  I mean lawyers existed before this thing called blogs, right?  And they provided high quality legal services, right?  On the other hand, it's tough to deny the effect of blogs as an informational resource used by practicing lawyers and others.  I regularly use information that I pick up in reading blogs.  That said, it's probably a stretch to say that lawyers cannot provide quality legal services without reading niche blogs.  Quite a stretch. 

One thing about blogs that make them less efficient is that rarely do any blogs publish on a regular schedule.  There's a reason for this:  as Drug and Device Law posted, legal bloggers are not typically getting paid to blog.  They are doing so for a variety of reasons, none of which involve direct payment of money in exchange for generation of content.  In contrast, the folks putting together advance sheets and newsletters (think Pike/BNA) are paid to put out the content they regularly produce.  Thus they do it on a regular schedule, which makes it much much more efficient (rss notwithstanding).  The few blogs I regularly read for practice reasons - which include several niche blogs (partial list: here, here, here, and here) - do not publish on any sort of fixed schedule.  There are ways to avoid checking a blog when it hasn't been updated, but I am still stuck in the old fashioned method of surfing on over.  And this is not terribly efficient, particularly when my next step when I see that one of the above blogs has not been updated is to surf over to Perez.  I read "niche legal blogs".  In the process, I also spend a lot of time just surfing.  This is the case for most people I know.

Second, there's little useful information that's exclusive to blogs.  A Lexis/Westlaw alert (there are others) will probably get you all the primary authority you need.  Sure it's great to hear about what the leading lights of the field or the academics have to say, but the day-to-day law practice rarely offers the luxury to work in these sorts of high-minded thoughts into actual pleadings or arguments.  With respect to the big cases that come out, everyone is talking about them in a matter of days (obviously blogs are much quicker to jump on the discussion and to actually "engage in the discussion," which makes them useful).  But from the standpoint of just keeping track of new cases, it generally doesn't matter much whether you read the newsletters/advance sheets or the blogs.  Both will do the trick.

So where does this leave us?  My thinking is that blogs are not really the only way to keep up to date with the latest goings on.  People were doing so before blogs were around.  However, I do think that blogs offer an easy and inexpensive way to do this.  You no longer have to pay for any sort of subscription service.  Instead, you can just keep track of the 3-5 (or 5-10) people in the field who are following the latest developments in the field and discussing them.  This probably has a level the playing field sort of effect - people who can't afford to pay for subscription services still have the ability to keep track of the latest developments.  This is a great development.  Is it revolutionary?  Probably not.  Do you need to read blogs to provide quality legal services?  Probably not.