“It took many hours, several cups of coffee, a couple glasses of whiskey, and a bit of cursing,” and criminal defense attorney and blogger Josh Camson designed his law firm’s website.

Camson said he saved the firm a “good chunk” of money with the tech move, but was also keen to try something different.

In a blog about the experience on the site Lawyerist.com, the lawyer uncovers the sense of satisfaction and the difficulty factor of the job.

“I’m not much of a handyman. I can’t fix many things or build cool stuff around my house. But I can dabble in HTML. When I finished the firm’s website, I had a nice sense of accomplishment. Sure, it may not be the shiniest car on the block, but it gets the job done. Plus, creating the website let me try something different. Writing code and playing around with website design is completely different from legal writing," he writes.

In a guide to law firm marketing, the lawyer argues the website build “isn’t exactly brain surgery”. Content took a little bit of time, and now there is only some tweaking to do, he said.

The lawyer’s legal partner and himself are now the only ones responsible for the content on the site. “We are the ones who will get in hot water if the entire site isn’t checked for compliance with the ethics rules”. 

In a somewhat damning comment on marketing experts, the lawyer writes: “I didn’t want to trust some marketing ‘guru’ or SEO ‘expert’ to write the content for me. After all, my reputation is at stake.”

The lawyer does appear to actually think marketing people are not experts in their fields, an old-fashioned view to say the least. As for SEO, it will be interesting to see how many hits the site gets, blog-links and articles about his comments linking to the site aside. 

The lawyer says he didn’t want to spend hours discussing content with a designer, “only to have the same stuff on my site that the designer used for some attorney in Texas”. 

What do you think? Should lawyers be putting their own websites together, or should they leave it to the “experts”?