There are a few simple ingredients needed when making a good blogger. One of them is voice, personality and humor. OK, that’s three things. Of course you need to have something to say, and you have to like saying it. David Rossmiller, the Insurance Coverage Blog blogger, has enough ingredients to make a couple bloggers. Because the world already needs more of them.

Not content just to report what’s going on, and not content even to say what he thinks, he is impelled to be interesting in how he says it. Oddly, Rossmiller has become a prolific blogger on the Richard Scruggs case, where Scruggs and others were indicted for allegedly attempting to bribe a state judge in an attorney fee disputed regarding State Farm’s Katrina settlements.
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This is a very serious matter, but who says a blogger can’t have a little fun? Like when he reported that Attorney General Jim Hood moved to dissolve a restraining order barring him from continuing his criminal investigation of State Farm. “Hood has been a prisoner of his office for months now,” Rossmiller wrote, “reduced to a sort of Capt. Queeg-like state, mumbling about going after makers of fake contact lenses while clacking ball bearings in his hand.”
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Rossmiller has formed a virtual, if not completely imaginary, community. He addresses them by their new name, and doesn’t leave himself out of the posts. “Good day once again to the Scruggs Nation. A confluence of known and unknown deadlines and responsibilities of varying sorts -- unusually heavy even for my schedule -- robbed me of almost all blogging time yesterday and the night before, and Scruggs Nation posts take considerable prep time and effort. Thanks for the outpouring of concern and support from across the Scruggs Nation. I have not been abducted, nor have I fallen ill from mysterious radioactive substances slipped into my red Yellowstone mug of decaf with the white moose silhouette. I'm still trying to go through all the e-mails in my inbox, so I apologize if I haven't gotten back to you.”

And he’s humble. “ . . . . I hope it goes without saying, I do not hold myself out as an expert or authority of any kind, I am merely someone at a distance trying to hold a mirror up to nature, to report what I see and hear. I myself do not know the answers to very much, I am merely attempting to ask the right questions.”

In describing the several requests to shuffle the players in the Scruggs case, Rossmiller, whose claim as a decaf drinker is dubious, had this to say: “I haven't seen so many lawyers move around this fast since they evacuated my building last year because of a gas leak. Seems like everyone in the Scruggs case either wants someone else's lawyer or the lawyer wants someone else's client. Sounds like a writer's-strike Boston Legal script that didn't make the cut.”

Keep blogging, David. I don’t have a reason to care about this case in particular but I like reading what you have to say about it.

David Rossmiller is an attorney with Dunn Carney Higgins Allen & Tongue. His blog, one of our “Top Blogs” (see all of them at the bottom of our page), can be found at www.insurancecoverageblog.com.