A fellow new to me, one Bruce Marcus (a self-described former
Upper West Sider, I hasten to add, as well as someone with an enviable
first name), alerted me to a post of
his about the impact of legal blogs:

"Aside from political blogs, few areas have produced
more interesting, valuable and sophisticated material than the
legal profession. You have only to look at the growing number of
blogs for and by lawyers to realize that the massive power of law
bloggers can ultimately influence the law itself, and certainly
its practice.  Law firm blogs report on techniques of practice
management, practice news, practice gossip and practice techniques.
Led by a long list of pioneers, such as Monica Bay (The Common
Scold), The Volokh Conspiracy, Andy Havens, Dennis Kennedy, Bruce
MacEwen, Larry Bodine, Jerry Lawson, Sabrina I. Pacifici, Robert
Ambrogi, and many others, the network of law bloggers has blossomed."

Excuse me while I finish blushing.

To
my mind, and I’m confident Marcus would agree, the impact of blogs—particularly
in knowledge-intensive domains such as the law itself, management
of law firms, and practice group management—stems from
their spontaneous creation of a distributed network of wisdom and knowledge. 

And,
unlike in the world of "MSM" (mainstream media), a Darwinian
competition enforces a discipline upon content, meaning that cant, obfuscation,
and insincerity will be rejected and ignored, and that thoughtfulness,
a felicitous tone of voice, and critical insight will rise to the top.
Put more simply, if The New York Times has a bad day, I’ll still
read it tomorrow; but if a blog disappoints, there are plenty more where
it came from.

Proof that this "distributed intelligence" is a genuine phenomenon
was "Rathergate," where a powerful array of arcane specialties
(the fontography of 1970’s-era IBM Selectrics, for example) spontaneously
assembled to deal a blow to the august CBS News division.  I
wonder when or if there may be such a seminal event in law-land.