Ethan Ackerman Reflects on the Blogiversary (Part 7 of 10)

[Continuing with the blog’s celebration of its 20 year blogiversary, I’m sharing this reflection from Ethan Ackerman.]

In the early oughts (zeros?)–right around Y2K, the .com crash and 9/11–the ‘series of tubes’ that was the Internet was, while still a somewhat newish/fad-ish thing for a lot of attorneys and law schools, impacting significant parts of even offline legal life. It wasn’t going away, and it wasn’t just a bunch of manually scratched together HTML pages, either.

At law schools, the students were still in the very first cohort of people who had access to PCs during college, and many of them still relied on school computer labs for access to a computer/printer. Law schools might have a website page for prospective students, but Law School blogs and law professor blogs were still an exception, not a rule.

As a work-study funded effort, and because I was the only work study student who said ‘yes I had made a web page’ before, I was asked to help get a (then- rudimentary) legal blog online for the University of Washington’s new Center for Law, Commerce, and Technology.

As I intermittently continued to help that blog after my graduation, one of my now former professors suggested that I should try and keep track of the work of, or maybe even reach out and contact, Eric Goldman at Marquette, who “is doing that, and doing it well.”

I did follow Eric’s work at Marquette – and eventually even reached out around the time he moved to Santa Clara. Eric graciously responded to emails from a recent law student graduate from a school other than his own, and we periodically corresponded about new legal cases, or spam case developments following an amicus spam brief I had worked on as a UW student, etc. At the time, the law professor networks were still mostly over email listservs and just transitioning to the web, and quite a few email lists were professor-only, so corresponding with … former students … at other schools… was somewhat of an outlier. After he formally started it, Eric’s blog was immediately something I followed and soon enough commented on/corresponded about.

While that now sounds very academia, from the start, a lot of Eric’s posts drew the attention of practitioners beyond just the academic blawgosphere. And it was actually a few years after my graduation, as an actual (but baby) practitioner, that I was able to contribute most of my guest and joint posts to his blog.

Especially for an under-/briefly un- employed law student graduating into the economic recession following 9/11, blogging in professionally rigorous ways about actual internet cases was professionally a no-brainer. But it was, like Eric still says, a lot of fun. It was talking (sometimes talking snark) about the cool things on the Internet we cared about, and if we were lucky, worked on in our day jobs. I’m actually proud, and consider it probably one of my biggest professional accomplishments, that I can say I have read about my own cases on Eric’s blog as far back as 2005 and as recently as 2025.

My contributions to the blog took a very hard cut‐off when I joined my present employer (with its understandable but rigorous Law Firm prohibition on outside blogging), but the reading continues to this day… and I’m glad that I could put a little bit of my love into what is so clearly Eric’s labor of love.

Thank you for blogging.

(Ethan Ackerman is Of Counsel at Morgan Lewis, in the firm’s DC office, where he serves in the firm’s electronic discovery practice. Before that, he served as Legislative Counsel to a US senator, advising on turn-of-the-century digital laws such as CAN-SPAM, the Do Not Call implementation Act, DMCA revisions, the legislative enactment of the 2005 amendments to the FRCP, and the Homeland Security Act of 2002, among others. In 2002, he graduated from the University of Washington School of Law.)

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Coverage of the 20 year blogiversary:

Part 1: Celebrating the Blog’s 20th Blogiversary
Part 2: How Has the Blog Changed Over the Past 20 Years?
Part 3: Who Reads the Blog, and Why?
Part 4: Readers’ Favorite Topics, Posts, and Memes
Part 5: How the Blog Helps Readers
Part 6: Jess Miers Reflects on the Blogiversary
Part 7: Ethan Ackerman Reflects on the Blogiversary
Part 8: Guest Bloggers of the Technology & Marketing Law Blog
Part 9: How Information Consumption Habits Have Changed Over the Years
Part 10: What Will This Blog Look Like in 10 Years?

Coverage of the 10 year blogiversary:

Part 1: Happy 10th Blogiversary!
Part 2: The Blog’s Impact
Part 3: The Blogosphere’s Evolution
Part 4: Changes in Internet and IP Law
Bonus: A Video Interview About the Blog