If Hurricane Gustav is anything like 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, lawyers who blog will be cut off from the outside world when the storm comes ashore and the power goes out.

If Hurricane Gustav is anything like 2005's Hurricane Katrina, lawyers who blog will be cut off from the outside world when the storm comes ashore and the power goes out.

If Hurricane Gustav is anything like 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, lawyers who blog will be cut off from the outside world when the storm comes ashore and the power goes out. But Twitter — a microblogging service that limits posts to 140 characters and can be updated and read from cell phones — may provide a way they can stay in touch with the outside world.

Ernest Svenson — a New Orleans solo practitioner and one of the earliest legal bloggers, known online as Ernie the Attorney — has turned to Twitter to stay in touch during the storm. He’s planning on riding out Gustav behind the storm shutters of his high-rise condo in the Uptown neighborhood. You can follow his Twitter feed here.

Here’s how he expects it to play out, in his own words from an e-mail interview conducted early Sunday afternoon:

“During Katrina the only sort of reliable way of communicating was with text messages. The cell phone network got clogged pretty quickly with people trying to contact loved ones etc. So calling people was not possible. But text messaging worked pretty well.

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