A few years ago and before I had tenure, one of my more senior UNLV colleagues asked me to write a short piece for the ABA’s Human Rights Magazine on corporate political spending. As this isn’t my primary focus, I benefited enormously from reading work from Dorothy Shapiro Lund and Leo Strine as well as Tom Lin. The format didn’t allow for citations so I try to just use their names whenever I talk about it so it’s clear their ideas influenced me.

I made the time to write it and the essay has resulted in a decent amount of outreach to talk about the topic. Last week, a portion of an interview I gave to Marketplace ran. They reached out because of that short piece in the ABA magazine. Since then, I’ve heard from classmates I haven’t talked to for some time calling and texting to tell me they heard the interview. Apparently, I’m friends with an NPR-listening crowd.

If you want your work to reach larger audiences, you really have to write short pieces in addition to law review articles. On a few occasions, I’ve had op-eds follow law review articles. It’s a challenge to distill a complex law review article into an op-ed, but I find it helps to remember that you don’t need to give them the full argument–just make your case in a fair way.

When you reach a broader audience, you also see a broader range of reactions. Some hostile email has come in from offended stockbrokers or lawyers from time to time, but overall I think the benefits outweigh the blowback.

Now that I’m on the other side of the tenure divide, I’d probably still want to write that small piece, but I wouldn’t feel any pressure to do it. If it makes sense for you, I’d encourage you to do some short form writing as well. We often measure ourselves by our law review footprints, but I don’t know how much that will always matter. As institutions get better at measuring other forms of scholarly impact, you might see surprising returns from shorter-form work. You might also independently decide that doing some things with broader distribution matters to you even if your institution isn’t skilled at counting and quantifying that impact.