Unlike most other persons and professions, the legal industry is made up of individual lawyers who are their own brand - they are public entities with a personal reputation that must be managed. How well or how poorly a lawyer manages that brand - through expertise, accomplishments, marketing, and public activity of all kinds - directly affects the success of that lawyer's career. In the online world, this gets complicated.

The simple truth is that everyone leaves a trail online, and the average legal consumer knows it: the smart ones routinely look up a lawyer's name in Google before considering an in-person contact. The problem, and unlike the offline world, is that bad profile on the web does not go away. And with the increasingly tabloid nature of modern society, it's becoming more common for negative profile "blips" to occur.

This article, published by the Canadian Bar Association's National Magazine in March, 2008 discusses how to get control of your identity and reputation online. It also discusses the strategy of how to reap the rewards of a personal publishing, and the tactics required to become a thought leader.