When I first started blogging I was really an oddity for being a lawyer that would effectively self-publish. People couldn’t quite work out why I was doing it and assumed that I was some sort of PR-hungry attention junkie. There were some people who thought that it was inappropriate for a lawyer to be doing this sort of thing at all. Someone in my former chambers made a complaint to the head of chambers because it was thought to be inappropriate. Rather too much like his wife’s Heat magazine. But that didn’t go very far and I’ve been blogging ever since.

Lucy Reed has been writing about family law at Pink Tape (“a blog from the family bar”) since 2007. A barrister at St John’s Chambers, Lucy is one of a select few legal bloggers to come recommended by the Court of Appeal. Her work on public legal education extends beyond WordPress: she is the author of a book for litigants in person, The Family Court without a Lawyer, and has over 120,000 views on a series of accompanying YouTube videos. Lucy is also a strong advocate of transparency and openness in the family courts: along with colleagues from the Transparency Project, she has recently published another book on Transparency in the Family Courts: Publicity and Privacy in Practice.

In this podcast, Lucy reflects on her experience of challenging misreporting in the media, the overlap between legal and journalistic skills and how to communicate complex ideas to different audiences. Press play or any of the links above to listen.

This is the second in a monthly series of discussions with some of the UK’s leading legal bloggers, extracts from which are being added to the Free Movement training course Introduction to legal blogging. Coming up in May: Giles Peaker on housing law blogging.