The blog docket.

Jim Butler, who heads the 50-lawyer hospitality group at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Marmaro LLP, says that last year he found that there were more than 600 blogs devoted to law. None of them, he discovered, focused on hotel law. So he started his own.

"It was probably about a year ago that I started noticing a number of articles about how important blogs were going to be as a means of communication, particularly among people in a given industry," Butler said.

Butler has always been interested in computers, crediting his technical savvy to his lifelong fascination with science and technology. When he was in high school, he planned to become a nuclear physicist but turned to the bar instead. He's become one of the nation's best-known hospitality lawyers.

He said that his blog is a great vehicle for communicating with clients--and branching out. In his near-daily entries, Butler muses about hotel condos, disaster preparedness, employment issues, finance, land use and management agreements.

"For us, the global hospitality group is all about creating solutions to client-hotel transactions and problems," he said. "Being able to disseminate information quickly is critical and that was my inspiration to take the next step and make this blog happen."

Butler said the response to the blogs from friends, clients and people he's meeting for the first time has been "overwhelming." Writing the entries at www.hotellawblog.com takes five to ten hours a week, Butler said, most of which is done on weekends and late at night.