This Blog Is 20 Years Old

My first post on this blog was 20 years ago today.

I think that’s worth noting, but I’m not going to get sentimental about it. For two reasons.

First, this blog is in the flood-plain phase of its journey. My subject—how to say clearly and concisely whatever you want to say in a contract—is finite. I’ve had less to say in recent months and years than was the case in the raging-mountain-torrent phase. In March 2026, I published six posts on this blog; in February 2026, I published four posts. By comparison, here’s the number of posts from four earlier months selected at random:

• September 2018, 17
• April 2015, 17
• October 2012, 10
• March 2009, 20

I have in the pipeline a couple of articles I’d rate among my best ever, so it’s not a matter of my getting flabby in my old age. Instead, it’s simply that my focus is shifting to how to make sure that A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting doesn’t languish at the margins of a broken contracts process.

My second reason for not getting sentimental is that social media isn’t as compelling at it used to be. Comments on my blog used to be fire!🔥Now they’re a ghost town: no one’s interested in posting to a microcommunity.

But LinkedIn isn’t exciting. And I see no reason to start a Substack or something comparable. So I’ll happily continue posting on my blog, so that’s where the entire corpus is. This post will be post 2,671.

The blog has helped me spread the word, but just as important is how it has allowed me to prepare materials that would later be dropped into MSCD. MSCD would not have existed without the blog.

And the blog wouldn’t have existed without you, faithful reader! I’m glad you’ve found it sufficiently useful that you’ve made your way here again.

(The image is one of my cakes. Time to make another one.)