"I don't know how this next generation is going to build networks other than through writing and thought leadership."

Like most of his clients, Jeff Porter at Mintz in Boston believes that everybody should play by the same rules, all of the time. That’s why he keeps writing about, for example, the jurisdictional reach of the Clean Water Act – EPA’s rule now only applies in 23 of the 50 states – and inconsistencies in the EPA’s regulation of forever chemicals: “Our job as practicing lawyers is to know the rules and help our clients comply with them. That's what lawyers do. So when you have these circumstances where there are no rules or the rules are impossible to discern, that's not the system we're supposed to have.”

We talked to Jeff about his writing, success, and becoming one of JD Supra’s most-read authors in Environmental law.

How, when, and why did you get started writing?

I’ve always been doing it. Early in my career, I would submit articles maybe four or five times a year to print publications. Then fast forward almost 30 years to when the pandemic happened: I’m sitting in my house on exhausting and completely unfulfilling Zoom calls all day, and I just stumbled on writing the blog as a way to stay connected with my clients, with others in the environmental law bar, and, frankly, with the world at large.

Being able to see the readership data from JD Supra – how many people are reading my work, where they are across the globe, and the industries and agencies they represent – made me feel connected to others even though we couldn’t actually be together.

Since then, I've just continued to do it. I don’t try to write about everything – there are three or four areas I focus on. I write about Clean Water Act issues, the contaminants known collectively as PFAS, and the challenges major clean energy and waterfront development projects face in federal, state, and local permitting. Each of these areas is rapidly evolving.

What is your writing process?

It’s not complicated: I wake up every morning and read the trades – Bloomberg Environment, Inside EPA, Energy and Environment, and others – and if there’s something that interests me that I think will interest other people, I write a blog post about it.

I typically try to stay under 500 words – these aren't long law review pieces and, frankly, I'm not smart enough to get to that level of intellectual depth – just “here's what I think you need to know about this development that somebody else is reporting on today.”

I have a really supportive professional staff here at Mintz: everything I write gets a look to make sure that it's not offensive to the firm or one of its clients and then it's out there. We use a platform that makes publishing blog posts incredibly easy, so the process for me is quite simple.

Your titles are great – a mix of irreverence, informed commentary, and above all, personality. Have you always done that?

I have a colleague who says that I have a unique gift for being snarky without being condescending. I certainly don't mean to be condescending – I am naturally a very sarcastic person and don’t write that way to drive eyeballs.

I have to give a shout out to one of my longtime colleagues/competitors in Boston who's also on the JD Supra Reader’s Choice Awards list, Seth Jaffe at Foley Hoag. To me, he is the consummate environmental law blogger, and he was doing it years before me. My writing style is similar to his, too: I try to catch people's eyes either with unexpected references, maybe to Steve Martin or Bill Murray, or the lyric from a song. The lousy comedic references not so much, but the lyrics are definitely something that I borrowed from Seth.

Who is your audience? How can you tell if they are reading your work?

If you look at the deepest silos of my practice, they coincide with the things that I write about. I represent the regulated community – folks interested in the permitting of major projects – as well as entities dealing with the legacy effects of PFAS and people who find themselves on the wrong side of an interpretation of the Clean Water Act. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to say to those people on those issues, and I’d certainly like to be better known by people who work at those entities that could become clients of the firm. That's a compelling notion.

But on the other hand, and not to sound like I'm older than Father Time, but having done this for 35 years or so, I'm also at a point in my career where I have things I want to say to everybody about environmental law topics and how those topics relate to them. So I use my writing to talk to everybody, people who might be clients at some point, of course, but also everyone else interested in the topics.

In some respects, I'm a frustrated policy guy who ended up not working in a policy job. While a lot of what I'm addressing is about how the regulated community needs to pay attention to this or that issue, it's equally about what government should be thinking about.

[When] I see that somebody other than clients and potential clients is reading my work, I never feel like that was a waste of time.

Let me give you an example: in the work that I do on clean energy, specifically infrastructure permitting, we’re – if you believe the scientists – about seven years away from a real problem owing to how we power ourselves. But it takes longer than seven years to get the permits for a project, so if you came up with a great project today, it's not going to be operational by the time we need it to be. There's a little bit of chatter about that in Washington, but I think there needs to be more, and I feel like I need to keep beating the drum until people listen and make changes to the system.

So when the readership reports come in from JD Supra, and I see that somebody other than clients and potential clients is reading my work, I never feel like that was a waste of time. I'm flattered that anybody takes three minutes out of their day to read my 500 words. I enjoy it, and I am always happy to see that there are people at organizations around the world who seem to read pretty much everything that I do. And most of them aren't clients. If readers fall into the category of either potential clients or everybody else, I'm happy.

Why do you think you’re so successful at connecting with readers?

I try to put a complicated regulatory topic in an entertaining wrapper. You'll never see me write something that has footnotes or even a single footnote; I'm not trying to write a law review article. I'm trying to write 500 words or less that puts a topic that I think people should pay attention to in front of them in a way that causes them to click on it and read it when they get their JD Supra email in the morning. There are generally other articles in that email, so readers have to choose to click on mine. So I try to make it a little bit light and interesting.

...I'm trying to write 500 words or less ... in a way that causes [people] to click on it and read it when they get their JD Supra email in the morning.

I attribute my success to the fact that I'm saying things in a way that people don't mind reading, which is great. That's enough for me. And I do track it – I know that it's vanity, but I do pay attention and say, 'this piece got, you know, a lot more eyeballs than my pieces normally get,’ or ‘over the past 90 days, my readership is up,' or even 'over the past 90 days, my readership is a little bit down. Have I lost my touch?’ I do pay attention to that stuff – that’s why I’m writing in the first place – and if you look at the number of eyeballs I've had across the platforms in the past year, as an environmental lawyer in Boston at the beginning of my career, that would've been absolutely inconceivable. So it's cool.

In addition, I think it comes back to being snarky without being condescending. I'm not trying to pick on anybody – I am conscious about that. I know I have readers at the EPA, for example, and I'm sometimes critical of the EPA. I also know I have readers who work in the legislative branch of government – I don't know who – and I do intend to be critical of Congress a fair amount of the time, not just because it's an easy thing to do these days, but I do have themes.

How do you measure the success of your writing?

That’s a really interesting question. National trade reporters reach out to me with much greater frequency than they did before I started writing. I get invited to speak more often than I did before, and, in general, I suspect the fact that I have a bigger footprint has resulted in people reaching out to me who might not have otherwise reached out to me. In fact, an email just popped up on my screen from someone who's a national leader in the resilience space – the people focused on cost-effective strategies to minimize the damage of future floods – who wants to talk to me. That’s the perfect example of someone I don’t think I would have heard from before I started writing.

I get invited to speak more often than I did before...

I do get calls and emails from people who have read my stuff that want me to represent them or their community in cases that aren’t the right fit for the firm, though I always return the calls and emails and try to give them ideas. I can’t point you to a specific matter that I’ve gotten because I do this, but that’s not why I write: I've reached a point in my career when new things keep life interesting, and this is a relatively new thing that keeps life interesting.

What’s the single most important piece of advice you have for lawyers who aspire to become thought leaders through their content?

You have to be interested in what you’re writing about. If the chair of your department comes to you and says, this is going to be a hot area, and you're going to write about it, but you don't care one way or the other about it, you're not going to be effective. For example, I’m convinced that nanotechnology will be a big environmental issue for the next generation. However, I don't have the capacity or the runway to care intensely about it. If I wrote about it, it wouldn't be compelling. I think you have to pick topics that you really care about, and if you care about them, you'll find interesting ways to express yourself, and then other people will care about them.

You also need to be experienced enough to have something to say. So I don't think, for the type of writing I do, this is something that a third- or fourth-year lawyer is going to be able to do productively. But when I look at the generation right behind me, you know, people who have been practicing for 15 years or 20 years, I would really encourage them to do this because the ways that I networked aren't going to be available to them.

All the good and important stuff that happened before and after a meeting doesn't happen with Zoom or Teams or WebEx. Writing is a way to build a network, and if the ways that I networked are no longer available – at least for the foreseeable future – I would be thinking about how I can start to do this. I don't know how this next generation is going to build networks other than through writing and thought leadership.

[The latest in a series of Q&A discussions on successful thought leadership with recipients of JD Supra's 2023 Readers' Choice awards. Read additional profiles here.]