Should Your Law Firm Still Be Blogging in 2026? Yes—Here’s Why

Blogging is the marketing equivalent of eating vegetables. Everyone knows it’s good for them, but that doesn’t make them look forward to it. For many law firms, blogging feels repetitive, time-consuming, and outdated. Many attorneys dream of the day that technology makes blogging as unnecessary as physically going to a law library to do research. It’s okay to dream, but it’s important to understand that we aren’t there yet.

At PaperStreet , we often get asked, ” Is blogging still relevant in 2026?” The answer is yes. Blogging continues to deliver an outsized value on the time invested. The mistake that many firms make is assuming that blogging needs to be exciting or trendy to be useful and effective. Blogging isn’t about winning literary awards. It is about building trust with potential clients and providing search engines with concrete content to evaluate. In 2026, clear writing still does exactly what it always has: it shows people what you know and how you think.

Why Law Firms Want Blogging to Be Over

Blogging has a lot in common with regular exercise. There is ample scientific evidence that both work in the long term, but neither provides immediate tangible results. We like watching the dashboard or the scale to see instant proof that what we are doing works. We love the gratification of likes on social media. It is hard to get excited about things that don’t immediately validate our efforts.

Just like regular exercise, blogging quietly works in the background, building credibility over time. With exercise, we wonder whether our effort is worth it. Without commitment, it is easy to find other things to fill the time. The same is true of blogging. Blogging requires time, which is a scarce commodity for busy attorneys. In a strategy planning square, blogging falls into the important but not urgent category. This earns it a permanent position in the middle of the work pile. It is almost guaranteed that there will always be something more urgent to do.

This leads to excuse-making:

• “No one reads blogs anymore.”
• “AI answers everything now.”
• “We would rather invest in video, social media, or ads.”
• “It takes too long to see results.”
• “We are publishing content, but it does not seem to move the needle.”

All of these concerns are understandable. When blogging is dropped, it is usually not because it stopped working, but because it was expected to generate immediate results like other marketing tools. The misunderstanding about what blogging is supposed to do sets the stage for the real question: not whether blogging still matters, but what has actually changed about how it works in 2026.

A Brief History of Blogging

Venable, Baetjer, Howard & Civiletti was the first law firm to hang out its electronic shingle. It launched its website in March 1994. The term “blog” was first used in May 1999. It was created by programmer Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the existing term “weblog” into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his website, Peterme.com.

By the early 2000s, most law firms had launched websites. From the beginning, blogging was a standard, and usually uninspired, part of legal marketing. In law school, attorneys are taught to write for a certain audience – other attorneys. For many, writing for non-lawyers doesn’t come naturally. Its human nature to try to avoid what we aren’t good at. This disconnect is evident in most attorneys’ attitudes toward blogging.

Firms often assume that new technology has changed the underlying rules of blogging over the last decade. The reality is that very little has changed in core concepts, but the online environment in which blogs live has changed. The marketplace is far more crowded. Technology has allowed firms to explore and exploit far more niche markets.

If it seems like your competitors are everywhere all at once, it is because they are. This is especially true for lucrative practice areas. Advanced analytics have allowed everyone to figure out what actually makes money. The volume of legal content competing for rankings has exploded, creating a lot of noise and making it hard for anything average to stand out.

One of the biggest changes of the last few years is the AI-generated summaries at the top of the search results page. These summaries still rely on the underlying source material. This makes clear, original legal writing even more important than it was a decade ago. Blogging is one of the few ways to demonstrate real expertise. Blogging has not lost its relevance. It lost its tolerance for thin content, recycled explanations, and surface-level posts.

Blogging for Humans and Search Engines in 2026

One of the best pieces of writing advice ever given is “Write with your audience in mind.” This still holds true today. Your audience isn’t a search engine. Your audience is clients and potential clients who visit your website seeking solid legal information. Good legal blogs work because they make sense to people first.

Clear structure, plain language, and good explanations are not SEO tricks. The same qualities that help a potential client understand whether a lawyer knows what they are talking about are also rewarded by search engines. This is why writing for humans and writing for search engines are essentially the same.

Like regular exercise and eating vegetables, blogging done well and consistently over time quietly accomplishes several things all at once:

• Blogs explain complex concepts for non-lawyers in plain language.
• They create a written record of expertise that can be evaluated by both humans and search engines.
• They distinguish original thinking from generic, recycled, or canned explanations.
• Topics go deep enough to be genuinely useful, rather than stopping at surface-level answers.
• Content is based on real client questions.
• Fewer posts are published, but each one is meant to hold up over time.

Firms run into trouble when blogging becomes a box to check. Posts written to meet a schedule are easier than ever to produce and easier than ever to ignore. The firms that continue to benefit from blogging are those that treat it as a means of communication, not as a task to get through.

Blogging Isn’t Dead

Like exercising and eating vegetables, blogging is a good habit that isn’t dead yet and isn’t likely to be replaced anytime soon. Maybe someday, but we aren’t there yet. Blogging isn’t about instant gratification, and it is not supposed to be. It is about demonstrating judgment, showing what you know, and how you think. It gives potential clients a way to decide whether they trust the people behind the name. Like endurance and strength, it is something built slowly, but that lasts.

In 2026, the firms that benefit most from blogging are not the ones chasing trends or publishing the most content. They are the ones willing to explain what they know in writing, in a way real people can understand. If your firm wants blog content that demonstrates expertise and stands the test of time, we can help. Contact PaperStreet to talk about building legal content that earns attention for the right reasons.