Law firms of all sizes have turned to blogs to showcase their expertise, but at least one New Jersey firm has put the plan on hold out of liability concerns.

The reason: Its malpractice carrier said blogging would make the firm uninsurable.

James Paone II, of Lomurro Davison Eastman & Munoz, says that when he called Executive Risk Specialty, a unit of Chubb, he was told "this is not a risk they are interested in undertaking."

Though the reasons were not specified, Paone says he took the no-go message to mean the insurer anticipated that the blog might contain postings that could be construed as legal advice. He says he is still pursuing the idea and awaiting the carrier's fuller explanation. Chubb did not return calls by press time.

The Freehold, N.J., firm's experience may be an aberration, since blogging has become epidemic among lawyers over the past three years as a way of informing existing clients and demonstrating intellectual prowess to potential ones.

Then again, it could simply mean that not everyone checks with their carrier before launching blogs or that carriers aren't proactive in finding out which of their insureds are bloggers.

Blogs -- short for "Web logs" -- are akin to Internet-based bulletin boards that can be updated frequently to share news and opinion with the world. Some blogs are interactive, allowing outsiders to append questions or comments to posts, forming topical "threads."

As with law firms' Web sites, lawyers' blogs typically include caveats that the postings do not constitute legal advice, do not create a lawyer-client relationship and may not even be accurate.

"The key here is for law firms to have a strong disclaimer," says Ariel Hessing, executive vice president of Walnut Advisory Group, which arranges malpractice coverage for law firms.

Hessing says underwriters at Lloyd's of London and Hudson Insurance Group of New York have told him of cases where courts construed mass-marketed materials from lawyers, in the absence of strong disclaimers, to contain legal advice and have allowed suits to proceed. The cases did not involve law firm blogs.

He says Chubb's position on the proposed Lomurro blog woud be reasonable if a blog's qualifying language were lacking. He says Lloyd's has only one claim, now on appeal by the law firm, by a claimant who allegedly relied on a disclaimer-less blog for legal advice.

But Kevin O'Keefe, who sets up blogs for law firms, says the suggested risk is blown out of proportion, since blogging is not qualitatively different than from other forms of communication a firm might use. "It seems to me they are arbitrarily selecting one way people communicate with the world, and scaring people into some kind of risk that's not there," says O'Keefe, president of LexBlog of Seattle, Wash.

A sampling of New Jersey law firms with active blogs say they've not run into any insurance problems as a consequence. They all post disclaimers -- even though a user may have to scroll to the bottom of a long Web page to find the "Disclaimer" link, in small type.

"You're expressing your views, but even so you include a disclaimer right up front," says Susan Ward, marketing director at Carlin & Ward of Florham Park, N.J., whose blog concentrates on law related to eminent domain.

"We're very diligent" about the disclaimer, says Richard DeLuca, business manager at Stark & Stark in Princeton, N.J., which started its first blog in 2004. He adds that the firm's premiums did not increase.

"Any time you put out any information, anyone who's reading it could take it as advice," says Barry Knopf of Saddle Brook, N.J.'s Cohn Lifland Pearlman Herrmann & Knopf, who set up a trusts and estates blog in January and has not seen any premium increase.

Knopf says it makes no sense for an insurance carrier to construe blogging as riskier than other communications tools lawyers use. "I can't imagine the basis for it," he says. "Where are the suits? It isn't logical."