1,389 - A very enjoyable run Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Crablaw Maryland Weekly has published 1,389 posts net of "kills" and "duplicates," including this final post. Other Crab Media projects have contributed another hundred or so, perhaps.

For the foreseeable future, this post will be the last post of Crablaw Maryland Weekly. For a number of reasons, I am shuttering the windows and putting out the "closed for business" sign here and on most of Crab Media's projects. The shuttering will including the demolition of most of Crab Media's content and form out of www.crablaw.com and most of its subdomains, save one.

Careful readers may have noted a drop in both quality and quantity of production of late here. I myself have noticed the quality drop more than that of the quantity. My old sense of humor is hitting a little flat, and I struggle to make myself read the Baltimore Sun daily to scrounge for news on which to comment. One very regular reader of CMW once commented that there was (for him) an inverse relationship between happiness and blogging. While I would not personally go that far, I don't have the spirit I once did for the hobby as a hobby. That's a sign of which a reasonably cautious person should take heed. But it's more about business issues than personal burnout; a vacation could (and partially did recently, for me) cure the latter.

I have been more focused on career and financial matters for my family in recent months. As some readers may know, both of our boys have a diagnosis of autism. Sam, 4, has made remarkable progress in language development of late; he now nags and connives for additional "Baby Einstein" playings and chocolate chip cookies far closer to chronological age level than before, and he is a model pupil at his special ed school to which he has this week happily returned. Noah, 2, has a "profoundly autistic" diagnosis which means little, since his high-functioning brother had the same diagnosis at the same age. In practical terms, this means that I am the sole paycheck since daycare for two autistic kids is not really practical or economical.

Due to my age and unusual career path, it is not a simple matter to transition back into the traditional feudal career model which big firm attorneys typically follow. I have been a solo practitioner in the past which fact makes me look like a flight risk at my age. BCG Attorney Search, a well-known search firm, drove this home to me in a form email they sent to me explaining that solos like me could not get jobs with their clients. Never mind the fact that those jokers at BCG cannot read or choose not to read English; while I have the escrow accounts and tax ID numbers needed for a solo practice, I have made less than 1% of my gross income as a solo since Bill Clinton was impeached in late 1998-early 99, right before we got married. The word "solo", like the words "disbarred" or "molester", appears to evoke an allergic reaction in much of the market, even the term is a decade old at the bottom of the resume. (To clarify for any readers as snarky as myself, only the first of those words applies to any part of my history....)

But from their perspective, who would rather work hard and long for someone else rather than for himself, especially if one is half a generation older than some of the junior associates ranked higher in the firm's structure? They would fear that I would walk off with a small piece of their clientele or at least that I would walk off before they recouped their investment in training me for their type of work. Government work remains a possibility as does, on the extreme opposite end, reopening my own practice, using the professional and personal advantages that the nine years after mothballing full-time solo practice have given me. Those skills and traits include successful first-chair jury trial experience, pre-trial motions and discovery practice, tax audit representation, business entity transactional work, fighting the State of Maryland in administrative hearing: the basic "eggs and coffee" work of a working full-service attorney with individual and small business clients. Along with those professional skills and experiences come cynicism about the legal profession, occasional bitterness, the recollection of past mistakes of youth and inexperience and some greater improvements in physical endurance and personal discipline than I would have thought likely at another time.

The work I am doing now in DC I actually like, both in itself and for the interesting people I get to meet. From multi-lingual pressure-deadline litigation document review, one can draw a very good income, but not build an asset or a fund fully a retirement plan. Plus I am rarely home during sunlight, due to the commute. This cannot stand; the portal-to-portal time distance needs to shrink drastically both for my family life and for the elimination of the economic non-billable dead-weight losses.

When I do a search for "Bruce Godfrey" on Google, I find Crab Media's content at the top. And that's fine for me personally, especially since other "Bruce Godfreys" are out there elsewhere. But Crab Media pays me only in personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment, not in shampoo or mortgage payments or diapers (!!??) or payments to Sallie Mae. I made a decision to blog in my own name and I do not apologize for that choice or regret it at all. But if I am going to make the most of my resources, I need to make some painful decisions about both my time and my web presence for marketing the one product I need to sell the most: myself.

I cannot allow my current Crab Media projects to be the first sites that people see when/if they Google me professionally. Not because I am ashamed of my work but because I am trying to achieve professional goals based on the delivery of a consistent message. Artemia jokes and tagging some politician's behavior as "aggressively stupid" are funny to me but they don't harmonize with making me better known professionally, whether as an employee or as a solo attorney. They don't help the customer/employer make the decision that is in their professional interest. While I don't know how common it is to Google an attorney before sending an employment offer letter or signing a retainer, I would Google someone under those circumstances and most decision-makers don't think or act like bloggers when reading a blogger's snark.

Anyway, enough "Rhapsody in Blue Funk." Here's what's going to happen.

1. Effective quite soon, perhaps within 72 hours, Crablaw Maryland Weekly is going down. All of the content of Crablaw Maryland Weekly on crablaw.com will be stripped and trashed, with the exceptions of a few very high profile posts (e.g. Take Back the Blog will stay up, as will some or all posts requested for preservation by readers). The original content will remain in Blogger's database unharmed as an archive, but crablaw.com will not host any of it; links to most such pages will mostly or completely become dead links. None of this will "scrub" my presence from the Internet's caches, Wayback Machine, etc., and "scrubbing" is not the goal. Striking Crab Media's current content will allow me to move beyond Crab Media's current projects in search engines towards professional goals and exposure to be described below; it's an issue of positioning, not sterilization.

2. The foregoing will be mostly repeated for Crabernet and the Disbarment blogs, though they don't amount to much. I will keep Crab's List up for a longer period because people are pretty actively using that site to find jobs through my RSS feed there, and I don't want to hinder somebody's access to getting a job.

3. Crabopedia is in limbo. I have some ideas on how to preserve Crabopedia off site but don't want to engage those ideas here without talking to some good folks about these ideas first. I do not have the time to purge Crabopedia routinely of the content generously offered by spammers originating from Taiwan and the PRC (or elsewhere.)

4. On the index pages of each stripped subdomain and on CMW's home page, I will put up a "thanks and all the best" page that will stay up for a short while. Thereafter, the subdomains will be destroyed (again, the blog content will remain within Blogger as an archive.) CMW's main page will redirect to www.crablaw.com/index.html.

5. The RSS feeds that feed the sidebars of some pages will not be disturbed initially but will no longer feed into Crablaw.com. If there is interest in the feeds, I will provide a means for those who wish to get those feeds to get them or their functional equivalent.

6. After the stripping of Crab Media is complete and a suitable short period of the "thanks, gang" pages has passed, Crablaw.com's index page will become the locus of my professional activities within the legal profession. It will revert to its old roots: a page and site dedicated to the practice of law in Maryland, with a strong possibility of forming the professional page of my new practice or practice environment. Crablaw.com will probably contain a blog but if so it will reflect far less political snark and more professional content. At some suitable point, I will probably redirect the new content to a new web domain altogether, one with a less ambiguous name for me as a professional, though that's a difficult decision to make and I don't need to make it today.

To my regular commenters - MBA members of course, Mr. X, Alon Levy and others whom I may be overlooking in my whirlwind of distraction, thanks very much, you have made this a lot more worthwhile and, frankly, enjoyable. A special thanks to commenter David Kyle, whom I predict we will see rising quickly in the Maryland blogosphere at his site The Candid Truth. While his politics are about 150-179 degrees opposite mine, I enjoy his blog and his sense of snarky humor. He is a smart, wily, tough-minded sparring partner (as are others noted above.) Besides, any man that chooses to dress both himself and his site in the style of the late Johnny Cash merits respect.

I consider myself a proud alumnus of the Maryland Bloggers' Alliance and will still be a regular reader, though less often a commenter. Those who would like me to keep specific post pages up for discussion or other purposes (e.g. recent links to Carnivals, etc.), please let me know and I will try in good faith to accommodate that request. Otherwise, to all readers and fellow bloggers, all the best.