Monday, July 13, 2009
Another New Networking Site for Lawyers

A new online networking site for lawyers and other professionals, HubSTREET, is unusual in that it evolved out of a bricks-and-mortar networking event. The site's founder, Nancy Fox, is a professional networking and business-development coach. In October, she launched a regular New York City networking program, The MetroRoundTable, to facilitate networking between lawyers and accountants. The two groups, it seemed to her, were a natural fit for referring business to each other. Soon after, she also brought bankers into the mix.

The events were such a success, Fox says, that she began to research how similar networking could be done online. Her conclusion, reinforced by feedback from her clients, was that existing professional networking sites such as LinkedIn were too broad to allow the kind of interaction she saw at the face-to-face events. Finding nothing out there that fit what she was looking for, she decided to start her won site.

HubSTREET went online in June and will not be formally launched until September. Fox describes it as a blend of Facebook and LinkedIn – less social than Facebook and less resume-driven than LinkedIn. From my perspective, I see it more as occupying a middle ground between LinkedIn's broad horizontal approach to professional networking and the vertical, lawyer-specific approach taken by sites such as Legal OnRamp and Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

Rather than be overly broad or intentionally narrow, HubSTREET targets a narrow slice of the professional services sector – lawyers, accountants and lenders. The rationale is that these three groups share a natural affinity that makes sense for networking. "As natural referral partners, you will now have the opportunity to meet the right people on line to build a richer, more robust referral base and ultimately your practice," HubSTREET says.

The truth, of course, is that some lawyers' practices share natural affinities with accountants and lenders and others do not. It all depends on the practice. For me, as someone whose practice involves media and technology law and ADR, accountants and bankers are unlikely to be referral sources for me or I for them. Still, it can't hurt to hobnob with people whose jobs are to lend and count money.

Why Another Site?

With so many networking sites already available and so few hours in a day, I approach any new site with the question, Why do we need another? For me, the only good answer to that question is that the new site offers me something different than what the others offer and that the "something different" is of value to me in some way.

As noted, HubSTREET's "something different" is its community – its blend of lawyers, accountants and lenders. Without question, that sets it apart. But does it provide value?

Its claim is that it "takes the work out of networking by bringing you together with the right quality connections – professionals and experts that are relevant to your business." Therein is the rub. If accountants and lenders are sufficiently relevant to your practice (and if they participate in sufficient numbers and with sufficient geographic diversity), then HubSTREET could prove to be of value. It seems to me, for example, that lawyers who represent small businesses and small entrepreneurs might find this useful.

But if accountants and lenders are not sufficiently relevant to your practice, then why bother? By positioning itself as the networking site for these three groups of professionals, HubSTREET is narrowing the slice of the legal community to which it is likely to appeal. I do not mean to suggest that is a negative -- I think "niche" networking sites could come to have an important place in online networking.

One other "something different" HubSTREET offers is what Fox describes as "facilitation." Until the site grows to the point where it develops a momentum of its own, she intends to help it along. She will do this through two techniques:
I like this idea of facilitated online networking. From what I see, lawyers often hit a speed bump in their online networking where they connect with someone but then have no idea of how to build on that connection. Advice from a biz-dev coach and opportunities to chat by phone about mutual interests could help nudge professionals over that bump.

Apart from these features, HubSTREET looks much like any other networking site – make connections, join groups, participate in discussion forums and post content. Ultimately, the proof of a networking site is in the pudding. Does it attract members and become a vital hub of constructive activity? It is too early to tell for this site. As of this writing, it has fewer than 100 total members. Of its groups, the lawyers' group is the largest, with 10 members. The accountants' group has six members and the lenders' group has four.

Gina F. Rubel, someone whose opinion I respect, wrote a positive review of HubSTREET for The Legal Intelligencer. The site could "serve as yet another excellent social networking tool for lawyers, perhaps one those who tend to be more conservative will be inclined to embrace," she said.

My gut instinct is that this site will never attract large numbers of lawyers as members. At best, it could prove useful to the subset of the legal profession that wants targeted networking with accountants and lenders. Even then, there are a couple of big "ifs" – if accountants and lenders also buy into using the site in sufficient numbers and if those accountants and lenders are ones with whom the lawyers share some community of interest, be it through geography or industry.

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Monday, April 27, 2009
Bar Associations on LinkedIn

Here are the bar associations I have found with pages on LinkedIn. With the exception of the International Bar Association and the Canadian Bar Associations, I include only U.S. bar associations. Let me know of others that I have missed.

International Bar Associations
National Bar Associations
State Bar Associations
Local Bar Associations

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Sunday, April 26, 2009
State Bar Associations on Facebook

I am in the process of researching how bar associations are using social media. Here is a list of state bar associations I have found with Facebook pages. Not included in this list are national and local bars. Please let me know of any state bars missing from this list. (Some of these links do not work unless you are logged in to Facebook.)

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Bar Association Twitter Feeds

I have been researching how bar associations are using social media. One aspect of that is identifying bar associations with Twitter feeds. Here is what I have found so far. Please let me know of others. As you will see, some are active, some are not.

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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Why Bother with Online Networking?

In conjunction with this week's official launch of Martindale-Hubbell Connected, the professional networking site asked several legal bloggers to be part of a week-long series on social and professional networking. Today you get me. Tomorrow's post will be by Monica Bay at The Common Scold. Others who have already posted in the series were Sean Doherty yesterday, Rees Morrison Tuesday and Kathleen Delaney on Monday. We are not receiving payment or any other gratuity for participating in this series.

I wanted to write to attempt an answer to the question I hear often about online networking, "Why bother?" My answer: To build and strengthen trusted relationships.

The goal of all legal networking, I believe, can be summed up in those two words: trusted relationships. Just as consumers buy brand names over generics, legal consumers hire the lawyer their cousin recommended and corporate counsel retain firms based on colleagues' referrals. In each case, what sways the decision is trust.

Trust is a strong word, but in the consumer context, it takes only a little to make a difference. Faced with multiple choices, the consumer wants help making the decision. The consumer wants reassurance that the decision will not later come back to haunt. Put another way, the consumer wants a reason to trust that the choice is the right one, or at least a good one.

For general consumer goods, trust comes in many forms. A brand name can invoke trust. Editorial and consumer reviews can build trust. Friends' experiences with the item reinforce trust. Simple familiarity can build trust.

Legal consumers are no different. In selecting a lawyer, they are looking for reasons to trust one over another. They have little objective help in this. Someone buying a car or a washing machine can find plenty of guidance. They can buy consumer guides, compare test results and read online reviews from others who have purchased the product. Legal consumers have few such reference points.

A recent survey asked lawyers, "What is the most effective method currently in use for finding new business?" The results were hardly a surprise. Fifty-nine percent said that the most effective way of getting new business was through client referrals and recommendations. The second most effective source of new business was peer referrals and recommendations. Other top sources of new business cited by the lawyers surveyed were networking events, alumni relationships, conferences and seminars, responding to RFPs and publishing.

Implicit in these is trust. When a new client walks in based on a former client's referral, it is because the former client's experience gave the new client a reason to trust you. When a new client retains you because another lawyer recommended you, it is because the new client trusted the other lawyer and therefore had a reason to trust you. When you speak at a seminar, you demonstrate your knowledge and command of your area of law and give those in the audience a reason to trust you. The same is true when you publish an article in a bar journal or legal periodical.

Online networking is no different than traditional networking – if you overlook the fact that it is plugged in, supercharged and global in reach. When done right and to full effect, social media tools add rocket fuel to all of the ways lawyers traditionally get new business. They support client referrals and recommendations, they support peer referrals and recommendations, they take in-person networking beyond physical limits, they strengthen alumni relationships, they simulate conferences and publishing by enabling you to highlight your knowledge and expertise, they even allow you to respond to RFPs.

In short, social media are a set of tools for broadening and strengthening your network of trusted relationships. Used properly and effectively, social media will enhance your reputation, strengthen confidence in your "brand," and broaden your professional and personal networks. All of these combine to give others a reason to trust you – and you them.

Next up in the series tomorrow will be Monica Bay.

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Martindale's Networking Site Comes out of Beta

Last July, I posted one of the first reviews of the beta version of Martindale-Hubbell's professional networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Today, the site officially came out of beta and had its formal launch.

For now, it remains open only to lawyers who are in private practice or who work as corporate counsel. Later this year, the site will become open to other legal professionals, today's announcement said. It launches with 3,000 members from the beta stage and six alliance partners – the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, Lex Mundi, the Council on Litigation Management, Pro Bono Net, the National Association of Women Lawyers, and TerraLex.

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Friday, March 20, 2009
Social Networking for Lawyers (Part Two of Two)

[The following column originally appeared in print in June 2008. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]

The problem with networking sites that limit their membership to lawyers is that lawyers are their only members. Compared with sites that are open to all comers, these restricted sites sometimes seem like the proverbial parties to which no one came.

In the first half of this two-part column, I looked at generic social and professional networking sites, ones designed for cross-sections of users. I promised in this second part to follow-up with a survey of sites designed specifically for legal professionals.

But as I looked at these lawyers-only sites, I was struck by how little networking went on within them. Whether online or off, networking anticipates a community, one defined by its members' mutual interests. Call it symbiosis, call it the profit motive, but networking carries the expectation of mutual benefit. When a networking site is open broadly to lawyers of all ilks, that benefit may be far too attenuated to justify the effort.

That is not to condemn all lawyer-networking sites, particularly not those that are built around this theme of mutual benefit. That benefit is readily apparent in a site whose members are divided between general counsel looking to hire outside firms and outside lawyers looking their flirtatious best.

Such is the idea behind Legal OnRamp. Its members are inhouse lawyers at large companies and outside lawyers mostly at larger firms. The latter get multiple opportunities to strut their stuff and, with any luck, establish or strengthen relationships with those on the inside.

Of the lawyers-only networking sites I looked at, this one seemed to offer the most promise for productive networking. With its three-fold focus on connections, community and content, it struck me as a next-generation iteration of a site that's been defunct for decade, Counsel Connect, arguably the first networking site for lawyers.

The similarity may not be accidental, given that Legal OnRamp's advisory board includes David R. Johnson, the former Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering partner who was CC's chairman. But Legal OnRamp's more direct lineage is to the general counsel of nine blue chip companies, led by Cisco GC Mark Chandler.

They sought a tool by which to automate collaboration and content-sharing among inhouse and outside counsel. It had to allow sharing among broad communities of lawyers while also maintaining secure areas for privacy.

The end result is a multi-purpose platform that cherry-picks the best parts from multiple platforms: extranets, Facebook, news aggregators, research libraries, document-management systems and the proverbial water cooler.

CEO Paul Lippe, himself a former GC, calls it a dynamic social system. It is also a selective, invitation-only system. Only about half of private-firm lawyers who request entrιe will be allowed in, and then only if they agree to pony up – not cash, but substantive articles or FAQs to be shared with other members.

Once inside, Legal OnRamp looks like other networking sites, revolving around connections among users. Unlike other sites, it puts as much emphasis on content as on connections. Up front are various news and blog feeds. Deeper in are libraries of FAQs, law firm bulletins, research materials and legal forms.

Within this networking superstructure, users can create private areas, called "ramps." Most ramps are created by companies. Cisco has one, for example. These closed-access ramps have their own, secure layers of networking tools, content libraries and collaboration tools. Cisco's, for example, includes a database of its contracts and another of its patents, among other items.

The beauty-pageant aspect of Legal OnRamp is a strong allure for private-firm lawyers. By posting content, contributing FAQs, and participating in discussion groups, they get to show their stuff in front of an elite group of potential clientele. There is even a Marketplace where GC can post RFPs.

"We're starting at the high end," said Lippe. "It's easy to move from elite to non-elite. It's not so easy to move from non-elite to elite."

Legal OnRamp may soon have some weighty competition. Later this year, Martindale-Hubbell will roll out a networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Like Legal OnRamp, a key focus will be on networking and knowledge-sharing between inhouse and outside counsel. For now, the service is in early beta testing with limited functionality and membership. A more in-depth review will follow in a subsequent column.

On Life Support

While the symbiosis between inhouse and outside counsel provides Legal OnRamp its fuel, the absence of immediate benefit may explain why sites that lack focus seem to falter. An example is one of the first of the current generation of lawyers-only networking sites, LawLink. A key measure of a networking site is its vitality – and this one was nearly comatose.

LawLink's structure parallels that of LinkedIn. Users build networks of "trusted colleagues," with networks extending through three degrees of relationships. The concept works well on LinkedIn, but not at all here.

Searching for lawyers from my state of Massachusetts, I found 107. Of those, fewer than a quarter had made even a single connection. Of those, only six had more than one and the most anyone had was five. These are some of the same people who are on LinkedIn and have hundreds of connections there.

LawLink hosts discussion forums around various topics, but these, too, are largely dormant. An umbrella "open forum" had a total of three posts, the most recent from November 2007.
Without more reason for its members to engage with one another, LawLink holds little promise for taking off. At least it still has a heartbeat.

A similar site, Lawyer-Link, appears to be comatose. The site's front page remains, but my repeated attempts to register failed. Attempts to contact the site's administrators by e-mail and phone did bring a voicemail from someone who said the site remains in operation. I'll have to take his word for it, given that I was never able to get in.

Communities of Interest

If the success of a networking site is tied to its support for a community of interest, then a recent launch that holds promise is PivotalDiscovery.com. Still in beta, its target is a subset of the legal community: e-discovery and litigation professionals. The mission, according to Isaac Cooper, the company's president, is to provide a platform where users can connect with each other individually and in common-interest groups.

Key features of the site include individual profiles and connections among members, group connections, forums organized by case phase, individual blogs, instructional and promotional videos uploaded by members, an industry events calendar, industry news headlines, and job postings.

Another promising group of networking sites are those designed for lawyers within a single state. The Minnesota State Bar Association, for example, is piloting a site for lawyers there called MyPractice. Still in testing, it was built using Ning, the make-it-yourself networking platform backed by Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen.

For professional networking with an international flavor, sample Lawyrs.net. Launched in September 2007 by a German company, its membership is distinctly international, with members from more than 100 countries, ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam.

One unique feature is an international directory of law firms. Each firm's listing includes its practice areas and international offices, along with news and updates about the firm added by members of the Lawyrs.net community. Click on a particular office location and get contact information and maps specific to that office.

If retro is your thing, ESQChat.com may be your site. It describes itself as a private meeting place for attorneys to ask questions, learn more about the law, and make new acquaintances.

It seeks to accomplish this by taking a giant step backwards to an age of chat rooms and message forums. Legal message boards rarely take off and these prove the point. The bulk of the forums devoted to legal topics had no posts. The chat rooms, likewise, were empty. So much for networking.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2008 Robert J. Ambrogi

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Social Networking for Lawyers (Part One of Two)

[The following column originally appeared in print in May 2008. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]

At a recent panel I was on about social networking for lawyers, one participant told of his success with the professional networking site LinkedIn. Within a few weeks of joining, he had made several fruitful connections, including one with a former classmate who is now the GC at a company his firm had courted. Thanks to LinkedIn, the courtship became a long-term relationship.

Stories of instant success are rare among lawyers using social-networking sites. But instant success is rare for any form of marketing. Of greater interest is the longer-term, cumulative value of these sites. With their enrollments growing by leaps and bounds, you should be a prominent member of the club.

For all their hype, social-networking sites are just glorified directories – the 21st Century version of the phone book or the legal directory. But unlike their forbears, these directories give you far more control, enabling you to tailor your listing and manage your network in ways no traditional directory ever could.

Some question the value of professional networking sites, given that a critical mass has yet to join them. To my mind, avoiding social networking until it becomes widespread makes no more sense than waiting to launch a blog until everyone else has one. Would you rather lead the pack or trail behind it?

This two-part column will provide an introduction to some of the leading social-networking sites. This month, I discuss three "general-interest" sites – ones open to all comers. Next month, I will review sites that focus membership on legal professionals.

Three Degrees of Separation

While all of these sites are for networking, some cater to professional networking and others to social networking. Among the former, the leading site is LinkedIn. It claims an international membership of more than 20 million professionals from some 50,000 companies.

With his 1990 play and later movie, Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare popularized the idea that we are all connected through the networks of people we know. LinkedIn is built on that concept, although it reduces the degrees of separation to three.

When you create a profile on LinkedIn, it becomes the hub of your network, allowing you to connect with other professionals and them with you. Your network consists of the people you connect with directly, their connections and their connections' connections, so that you are always within three degrees of connecting with anyone else.

Within your network and your extended network, you can mine for potential clients, service providers, subject experts and other contacts. You can also search for business opportunities and for jobs or job candidates. You can directly communicate with your first-degree contacts and, through them, request introductions to others.

What you get out of LinkedIn will turn on what you put into it. As soon as you sign up, add as many contacts as possible and continue to add more from then on. In addition, enhance your profile in other ways, such as by joining groups, endorsing other members, and posting or answering questions within your network.

LinkedIn costs nothing to join. Paid accounts offer extra features and options, but are not necessary to benefit from the site's basic networking tools.

Finding Friends on Facebook

In contrast are sites where the emphasis is on "social." The first of these was Friendster, launched in 2002, followed soon after by MySpace. But the one attracting the most buzz generally and among legal professionals is Facebook.

Launched as a virtual hangout for college kids, Facebook is on track to have the largest and most diverse membership of any such site by year end. As a social networking tool, Facebook is powerful. You can build networks around locations, interests, schools, companies or whatever. You can chat, share photos and videos, post bulletin-board style messages, play games, coordinate calendars and even advertise.

But for professional networking, Facebook falls short. One reason for this is that, unlike other sites, it hides your full profile from anyone you have not designated a "friend." Since joining, I have connected with a number of friends, but they are all friends I already knew – all connections I already had through LinkedIn.

Facebook is adding features to make itself friendlier for businesses. For example, businesses can now sponsor custom pages that focus on their products or services. But its strength is in maintaining existing connections, not building new ones.

Feeling the Plaxo Pulse

A hybrid between professional and social networking is Plaxo. At its core, it is a contacts manager. But over the past year, it has reinvented itself. Once primarily used for updating Outlook, it is now a multifaceted tool for managing, tracking and networking with contacts across multiple platforms.

Where LinkedIn's emphasis is on expanding your network, Plaxo's is on strengthening it. It does this through two primary methods, synchronization and sharing.

Its cross-platform sync feature lets you tie together all your address books. Plaxo syncs with Outlook, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Mac OS X, Hotmail and LinkedIn, as well as with mobile devices. It does the same with most calendar applications.

Sharing is where Plaxo shows its social networking side. With your address book as the launching point, you can connect with the people you know who are also using Plaxo. Once connected, any changes they make to their contact information is updated in your Plaxo address book and synchronized with your Outlook and other address books.

In addition, through a feature called Plaxo Pulse, it keeps you up to date with your contacts' other activities. As your contacts update their status on Twitter, post items to their blogs, or add photos to Flickr, their updates appear on your Pulse stream.

You can also create a public profile for yourself and merge into it any of your own external feeds as a single stream. That way, someone viewing your profile will see the universe of your current activity online.

Of the three, LinkedIn is the stronger marketing tool. Facebook is a fun way to keep in contact with your circle of friends and colleagues. Plaxo is a sure route to maintaining your contacts over the long haul.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2008 Robert J. Ambrogi

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Tweet 16: 16 Ways Lawyers Can Use Twitter

[The following column originally appeared in print in November 2008. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]

When it comes to social media, I tend to be an evangelist. But even I could not grasp why so many lawyers were all atwitter over Twitter. What value could there be in a microblogging tool that limits each post to 140 characters?

So I strapped on some wings and gave it a try. In no time at all, Twitter turned me into a songbird ready to sing its praises. For all those who ask, "Why Twitter?" I present my Tweet 16 – 16 ways lawyers can use Twitter to enhance their practices and their profiles.

First, a few words about how it works. After you sign up and create a user name, you can post short messages, called "tweets," of no more than 140 characters. These messages appear on Twitter's Web site and can also be tracked through mobile phones and other applications.

Once you are a member, you can choose to follow other members' messages. When you come across someone you know or find interesting, click the "follow" button to add their messages to your feed. (Find mine at http://twitter.com/bobambrogi.) Others can do the same to receive your messages. If you prefer to be less public, you can limit the visibility of your messages to people you approve.

It is so simple in concept, yet surprisingly versatile in potential uses. Here are 16 that stand out for me.

1. Expand your network. What with blogging, writing, speaking and various bar committees, I consider myself pretty well networked. So I was surprised upon joining Twitter at how many new contacts I made, how quickly I made them, and their potential value to me as a professional.

2. Discover new blogs. Everyone on Twitter has a profile page on which they can link to their Web site or blog. As interesting tweets catch my attention, I sometimes click through to find equally interesting – and previously unknown to me – blogs.

3. Mold your image. Those who post regularly to Twitter provide others a glimpse of their daily lives. That glimpse can help shape your public image. Do your posts paint you as a high-powered professional – now writing an appellate brief, now preparing for a deposition – or as a trivia-obsessed slacker – now breaking for lunch, now off for drinks? By thinking before you post, you can shape how others see you.

4. Distribute your news. Lawyers and law firms already use Twitter as a vehicle to distribute news and press releases. Even though Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, posts can include Web links. Thus, post the headline or a brief description together with the link to the full item.

5. Drive traffic. When you post an interesting item to your blog, mention it on Twitter with a link to the full post. Various tools let you do this automatically, updating your Twitter feed whenever you post to your blog. (I use Twitterfeed for this.)

6. Simulate the water cooler. For solo lawyers and self-employed consultants, Twitter is a virtual office water cooler. Throughout the day, lawyers on Twitter comment on the news, throw out questions and share articles and items of interest. You can reply directly to others, either publicly or privately.

7. Message your colleagues. You can send a direct message to anyone on Twitter, visible only to the recipient. This is a convenient way, much like instant messaging, to send a colleague a quick question or comment.

8. Monitor the buzz. What are hot topics among lawyers in your practice area? What are people saying about your client or its product? On Twitter, you can select the people whose posts you wish to follow. You can also search all Twitter posts, save the search and get updates via RSS. (Go to http://search.twitter.com.)

9. Get noticed by news media. News reporters are turning to Twitter to find sources and leads. Additionally, Twitter provides opportunities for professionals to connect and establish relationships with reporters.

10. Keep up with your local court. Courts in Philadelphia recently launched a Twitter feed of news and announcements. (Find it at http://twitter.com/PhilaCourts.) Others may well follow suit.

11. Track activity at a conference. Using what Twitter calls "hashtags," you can tag posts to connect them with other posts. One way this is useful is at a conference, enabling attendees to find each others' posts. The tag is marked using the pound symbol and placed directly within the post. For example, #legaltech might be used by attendees at the Legal Tech conference in New York. A site devoted to monitoring hashtags is at http://hashtags.org.

12. Follow the government. The White House, federal agencies and members of Congress are among the many sources within the U.S. government that use Twitter to distribute news and announcements. A list of federal government Twitter feeds is at Twitter Fan Wiki.

13. Promote an event or seminar. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal told how Andrew Flusche, an attorney in Fredericksburg, Va., used Twitter to promote a webinar he was holding on trademark registration. The session attracted 15 attendees, more than twice the number he drew for a subsequent seminar he didn't promote on the service.

14. Get more mileage. Why publish to just one source when you can as easily publish to many and reach that many more readers? When I post an item to my blog, it shows up in my Twitter feed. When I post an item to Twitter, it shows up on my Facebook and Plaxo profiles. In social networking, there is power in ubiquity.

15. Find clients. When a California blogger was threatened with a lawsuit over comments he made online, he turned to Twitter to search for a lawyer. Through Twitter, you may find new clients and they may find you.

16. Locate experts. Either by posting a message to Twitter or by using its search function, you may be able to find experts on a particular topic. If you do, use Twitter's direct message feature to make the initial contact.

There you have my Tweet 16. But I hasten to add something else lawyers can do on Twitter: Get in trouble. For example, a Seattle law firm recently generated controversy when its outside public-relations consultant posted a message to Twitter seeking putative plaintiffs for a possible class action suit.

Before you post to Twitter, consider the consequences. A casual tool such as this makes it easy to unwittingly create an attorney-client relationship or overstep an ethical rule. Even with only 140 characters, you can easily get yourself in hot water.

Copyright 2008 Robert J. Ambrogi

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Sunday, February 15, 2009
The Future of Online Networking for Lawyers

The current issue of the Boston Bar Journal (PDF) is devoted to Web 2.0. It includes a brief essay of mine, "The Future of Online Networking" (page 18 of the journal and page 20 of the PDF). The gist of my essay is summed up in this:
The future of these sites, at least within the legal profession, promises more than mere connections. Networking will remain a key part of the picture, but as more sites compete to serve the legal profession, they will offer more diverse and practical suites of tools.

Networking sites will morph into broader, online communities for legal professionals. Along with connections, they will offer community, content and collaboration. They will be places where lawyers will not simply network with each other, but also work with each other and share resources with each other in more substantive ways.
The Boston Bar Journal is the magazine of the Boston Bar Association.

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Saturday, February 14, 2009
ABA Social Network Fails to Connect

Law.com has my review of LegallyMinded, the ABA's new online networking site: ABA Social Network Fails to Connect. Here is a paragraph that sums it up:
Ambitious as it is, the site falls short on execution. It jettisons features that should be central and weighs itself down with others that are useless or redundant. It is as if the ABA came late to a crowded race, barefoot and with bricks in its backpack.
I had an earlier post about it here.

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Sunday, February 01, 2009
Twitter Draws in Steady Stream of Lawyers

Here is a good article from The Plain Dealer on lawyers' use of Twitter: Twitosphere drawing in a steady stream of twittering lawyers. I am among the twittering lawyers reporter Alison Grant interviewed for the piece.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
LinkedIn Launches 'Connections Beta'

The professional networking site LinkedIn today launched a private beta of a new feature, Connections, that allows you to better manage your lists of LinkedIn connections. The key feature is the ability to group your connections by assigning tags to them. Once grouped, you can then send messages to the entire group simply by selecting it. Thus, you could tag certain people as "friends" and then simply select that category to send all your friends a message.

The tagging feature starts out in a sort of smart mode. It pre-assigns tags based on connections it can decipher. For example, connections who were law school classmates of mine were already tagged "classmates."

The new feature also incorporates "type-ahead search," which lets you type just a couple letters in the search field to be taken to the matching name within your list of connections.

I received an e-mail from LinkedIn today inviting me to try it. I am not sure how many invitations went out, but I know from monitoring Twitter that I was not alone in receiving it.

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Sunday, January 18, 2009
A Great Video Tutorial about Facebook

OK, I'll admit up front that I am biased about this video, given that my son Ben Ambrogi produced it. And although it is addressed to educators, it is actually a useful overview for anyone who is new to Facebook. Ben produced this and a series of other video tutorials for a San Francisco-based company, Inigral, where he works part-time while attending the University of San Francisco. Inigral has developed an innovative Facebook application for use by colleges, universities and secondary schools.


Facebook for Educators from Inigral Inc. on Vimeo.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 3:45 PM, , links to this post

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Report: Use of Social Networks Quadruples

The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network has more than quadrupled in the past four years, from 8 percent in 2005 to 35 percent now, according to a new Pew Internet study of adults and social networks. Not surprisingly, use of social networks still remains much heavier among younger adults, with 75 percent of those aged 18-24 using social networks compared to 7 percent of those 65 and older. (Full report in PDF.)

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 1:37 PM, , links to this post

Friday, December 05, 2008
Sixteen Reasons to Tweet on Twitter

Law.com today published my article, Sixteen Reasons to Tweet on Twitter. This is the same article I mentioned last week, Tweet Sixteen, that was first published in Law Technology News. The version published today does not require registration or a log-in.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 10:10 PM, , links to this post

Tuesday, December 02, 2008
ABA Launches (Buggy) Networking Site

The American Bar Association has jumped on the social-networking bandwagon with a networking site of its own, Legally Minded. I wrote about it earlier today at Legal Blog Watch. As I said then, a bug in the site is preventing me from completing my registration. Fred Faulkner, the ABA's manager of interactive services, told me earlier today that they'd experienced this log-in problem in earlier testing but thought it was resolved. That was just after 9 a.m. As of 7 p.m., I'm still not able to log-in. Not a great start, but the site looks good and I look forward to getting access at some point so that I can provide a more complete report. Meanwhile, check out my write-up at Legal Blog Watch and then try Legally Minded for yourself

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 7:17 PM, , links to this post

Monday, December 01, 2008
Tweet 16: 16 Ways Lawyers Can Use Twitter

Law Technology News has posted my latest column, Tweet Sixteen: 16 Ways Lawyers Can Use Twitter. (LTN requires registration to read articles, but it is free.
When it comes to social media, I tend to be an evangelist. But even I could not grasp why so many lawyers were all atwitter over Twitter. What value could there be in a microblogging tool that limits each post to 140 characters?

So I strapped on some wings and gave it a try. In no time at all, Twitter turned me into a songbird ready to sing its praises.
Read the rest.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 11:53 AM, , links to this post

Monday, November 24, 2008
First Look: Martindale-Hubbell Connected

[The following column originally appeared in print in August 2008. I am republishing it as part of my continuing effort to maintain an archive of my published columns. Important note: I have not updated this since its original publication. While most of the sites remain as described, some may have changed. All information was current as of the date of original publication.]

As online professional networking gains traction within the legal community, Martindale-Hubbell has been quietly testing its own networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected, which it plans to launch publicly late this year or early in 2009.

The company made much ado in July about its partnership with professional networking site LinkedIn. But until recently, it operated in virtual stealth mode with respect to its own networking site.

A beta version of the site with limited functionality is now operating at www.martindale.com/connected. Martindale has invited a small number of lawyers to register for the site as beta testers. While I am not one of them, I was recently given a tour of the live site by John Lipsey, LexisNexis vice president of corporate counsel services. He also showed me slides of additional features to be added prior to launch.

As Lipsey's title suggests, corporate counsel are a central focus of the company's plans for developing the site. "One of my primary focuses now is to concentrate on the needs of corporate counsel in developing the relationship, community and tools aspects of this," he told me.

Those three components – relationships, community and tools – form the three overlapping circles that will come together in the final release version of Martindale-Hubbell Connected (MHC). All three are essential, Lipsey believes, if the site is to attract and retain legal professionals.

"One of the biggest differences in a successful professional networking site is that a social one doesn't really engage a professional in any meaningful, long-term way," Lipsey says. "We need to build business tools to help them do their jobs more efficiently and effectively."

Familiar Interface

Upon first logging in to MHC, the view is familiar to anyone who has used a networking site such as LinkedIn. For my tour, Lipsey logged in under his account, taking us to his main profile page. This showed his professional profile, his network of connections, his groups, and a running stream of updates from others with whom he is connected.

This provides our first glimpse of the potential power of a networking site built by a company with extended roots in the business of building lawyer directories. MHC includes a feature that suggests people you may know and therefore may want to connect with. In itself, this is not unique; other sites do this.

But MHC's suggestion tool digs deep, looking for connections not only among MHC registrants but also within Martindale-Hubbell's full database of more than 1 million lawyers and the LexisNexis database of judicial opinions. That means it will suggest connections not merely from among workplace colleagues or law school classmates, but also from among lawyers you argued with or against in a courtroom.

As a networking tool, this is powerful. It enables a user to quickly build a network beyond one's obvious connections. "This million-plus database has generated 45 million connections," Lipsey says. "That is 45 million instances of suggested connections among lawyers we think may want to be connected with each other."

As you might expect, this is not the only way in which MHC integrates with the directory. Another is in the directory itself. Say a corporate counsel searches the directory for a litigation attorney in Boston. If that counsel belongs to MHC, then the results screen will include a "My Network" tab showing lawyers who both match the search and are within the member's first- and second-degree network.

As of the late-July date of my tour, MHC had been in beta testing for only a matter of weeks and its functionality remained limited. Other features included an "inmail" system for sending member-to-member messages and a rudimentary legal news page. MHC launched with 20 beta testers and had just over 100 as of my tour.

Communities of Interest

While development so far has focused on the "relationships" circle, the next stages will build out the community and tools aspects of the site, Lipsey said.

The community prong will allow members to create controlled-access interest groups within MHC based on their own criterion. A legal organization, for example, could have its own community, or lawyers in a particular locale might create one.

Other communities will be created automatically. A broad corporate counsel community will include all in-house members. As new members join who work for a particular company, that company will automatically get its own community, accessible only by others who work there.

As Lipsey envisions them, these communities would feature content drawn from a variety of sources, some generated by users, some drawn from LexisNexis, some from members' law firms, and some from outside sources. They could include discussion groups, forums, blogs, webinars and more, and even house sub-communities with more specialized interests.

Another aspect of MHC's community prong will be community publishing in the form of a Wikipedia-like legal reference. The wiki will be written and edited by MHC's members, but Martindale with "pre-seed" it with the content from its Martindale-Hubbell Law Digest.

Another feature will be knowledge centers focused on the areas of law that most interest corporate counsel. These centers will include a variety of content drawn from CLE programs, webinars, published articles and elsewhere.

Tools for Corporate Counsel

The final prong in all this is to create useful tools, with a particular eye to corporate counsel.

One such tool will be client reviews – ratings and reviews of outside counsel to assist in-house lawyers with making hiring decisions. These reviews will be more detailed than Martindale's standard ratings, providing at-a-glance overviews of a lawyer's quality of service, value for the money, responsiveness and communications.

The reviews will be compiled from in-house counsel, who will be invited as they use the Martindale directory to rate lawyers with whom they have worked. Reviewers' identities will be kept anonymous. This feature will be available through both MHC and the public directory.

Another tool in the works is aimed at facilitating legal department management of preferred providers. Each MHC member who works in-house will be able to create a personal preferred-provider list that will become part of the member's standard MHC dashboard. As other lawyers from within the same company build their own lists, each can get access not only to their own, but also to a "master" list of preferred providers.

This master list will show not only providers' names, but also who among your colleagues have actually used them. In this way, counsel need not rely solely on a lawyer's public rating, but also can tap into the institutional knowledge of others within a company.

In conjunction with this, MHC is considering adding the ability to lift the anonymity of client ratings by direct request. This would allow a member to request an introduction to the reviewer of a particular lawyer and allow the reviewer to decide whether to accept.

A final component of MHC will be an RFP builder. MHC will provide templates for building proposal requests and a tool for aggregating and reviewing responses.

Lipsey believes that Martindale-Hubbell's established position within the legal community will enable it to build a superior professional networking tool. "We're putting resources to bear that only an established company can know to produce."

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 9:56 AM, , links to this post

Thursday, November 20, 2008
JD Supra Launches Facebook App

The document-sharing site JD Supra is launching an application for Facebook today that lets its members stream their documents and professional profile information into their Facebook profiles. This means that if you contribute documents to JD Supra, you can get additional exposure by having them show up in Facebook.

The application lets members display their documents in either or both of two ways -- a box in the left-hand column of a member's Facebook profile that displays the latest documents or a "My Docs" tab that displays all your documents as well as your JD Supra professional profile. Needless to say, you must be a JD Supra member and have contributed documents for this to work. There is no cost to join.

JD Supra is a site where legal professionals can share documents -- court filings, decisions, legal forms, articles, alerts, newsletters and the like. Contributors get to publish and highlight their best work and others get the benefit of free access to their contributions. I wrote about its launch in February 2008.

The advantage to an application such as this is that it gives you more bang for your buck, so to speak. By allowing you to contribute information to one site and have that information stream across multiple sites, you reach a broader audience and gain that much more exposure.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 8:47 AM, , links to this post

Monday, November 17, 2008
Firm's Site Highlights its Twitter Feeds


As lawyers elsewhere debate the value of microblogging tool Twitter, one law firm isn't waiting around for an answer. Texas-based firm Jackson Walker has created several Twitter feeds for news about its firm and it is featuring them prominently on its Web site. It is not the first law firm with a Twitter feed, but it is the first I've seen to highlight its feeds in this way.

Hat tip to 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 5:44 PM, , links to this post

Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Attorneys Flocking to Twitter for Marketing

I am among the lawyers interviewed by Justin Rebello for this Lawyers USA piece about lawyers using Twitter.
The difference between Twitter and a blog is akin to the difference between a haiku and a ballad, said Ambrogi.

"Blogging is such that you're trying to write a commentary and provide perspective," he said. "You can't really do that in a Twitter post. It's not intended as a replacement."

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 10:33 AM, , links to this post

Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Large Law Firms on LinkedIn

Greg Lambert at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has pulled together a fascinating overview of large law firms on LinkedIn. He explains:
I broke out my "researcher" cap and started delving through the LinkedIn Groups page to see how many of the top 100 law firms had some type of Alumni or Employee LinkedIn Group. I found that 35 firms out of the top 100 had a LinkedIn Group page. Most of them were Alumni groups, but there were a few that had current employee groups along with the Alumni, or specific groups just for employees. And, a few were apparently rogue employees that created a group at some point, but never did anything with the group after it was created.
His post includes two charts. In the first, he lists the 35 firms, the number of LinkedIn members, and the type of group. In the second, he breaks down the number of LinkedIn profiles linked to the firm, the number of those profiles that are attorneys, the median age, and the number of males and females.

By the way, the group that had the most members: Skadden Alumni.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 9:50 PM, , links to this post

Thursday, October 16, 2008
Now Twittering

Or is is "tweeting"? In any event, I'm on Twitter, with all of one tweet so far.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 5:22 PM, , links to this post

Friday, October 03, 2008
NYC Networking Presentation Now Online

The New York Legal Marketing Association has posted the slides from our Sept. 17 panel on social and professional networking (pdf). As I had noted in an earlier post, the other panelists were Doug Cornelius, a lawyer and frequent speaker and writer on the legal profession's use of knowledge management, enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and social networks; David Johnson, a former partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and a member of the advisory board of Legal OnRamp; and John Lipsey, vice president of corporate counsel services for LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, who is overseeing the launch of Martindale's new professional networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected. I served as moderator.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 6:46 PM, , links to this post

Tuesday, September 23, 2008
LinkedIn Success Stories

I am often asked whether professional networking sites such as LinkedIn ever generate new clients for lawyers. I previously mentioned one such success story. Now, here are several more, detailed in this Wisconsin Law Journal article published yesterday, Attorneys are Getting LinkedIn to Clients Online.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 1:06 PM, , links to this post


Boston Program on Social Networking

Goodwin Procter attorney and KM guru Doug Cornelius, Morrison Mahoney IT director Jenn Steele and I will team up Oct. 2 in Boston for a panel on social networking for lawyers and legal IT staff sponsored by the International Legal Technology Association. The lunchtime panel is free to attend and open to ILTA members and non-members alike.

More information about the event and registration is available at this ILTA page.

Doug and I were half of a four-person panel on social and professional networking last week for the New York Legal Marketing Association. As another of the NY panelists, John Lipsey of LexisNexis, noted on The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell, attendees there showed great interest in the topic. "Here was a room filled, to standing-room-only capacity, with legal marketers eager to embrace and make sense out of professional networking," Lipsey wrote.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 9:44 AM, , links to this post

Friday, September 05, 2008
Social Networking on 'Law Technology Now'

I was a guest this week on Law Technology Now, the podcast hosted by Monica Bay, editor-in-chief of Law Technology News. Our topic was social and professional networking for lawyers. We discussed my recent two-part column on social and professional networking sites (here and here) and my just-published first look at the beta version of Martindale-Hubbell Connected. (A working version of the Martindale column is available here.) You can listen to or download the podcast from the Legal Talk Network.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 8:57 AM, , links to this post

Friday, August 22, 2008
Facebook Page is New Twist in Biglaw Recruiting

In what may be a first for an AmLaw 200 law firm, Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle has launched a Facebook page to serve as a central component in its law school recruiting efforts. The page provides a range of information about the firm and its summer associate program, including:
This is one of those innovations that makes you wonder why no one thought of it sooner. Facebook is where the recruits are, so shouldn't it be where the recruiters are?

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 5:51 PM, , links to this post

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
NYC Panel on Attorney Social Networking

On Sept. 17 in New York City, I will moderate a panel, Web 3.0 Attorney Social Networking: The Next "Next" in Online Business Development and Client Service, with a stellar line-up of participants. Sponsored by the New York chapter of the Legal Marketing Association, the panel will include:

The program is at noon on Sept. 17 at The Harvard Club, 27 West 44th Street in New York.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 9:40 AM, , links to this post

Friday, August 08, 2008
My Article on Legal Networking Sites

Law.com today published Social Networking: For Lawyers Only? This is the second installment in my two-part look at social and professional networking sites for lawyers. The first part, published in June, is available here. This second part focuses on networking sites designed specifically for legal professionals. See also my review last week of a new professional networking site from Martindale-Hubbell.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 4:47 PM, , links to this post

Thursday, July 31, 2008
Exclusive First Look: Martindale-Hubbell Connected

As online professional networking gains traction within the legal community, Martindale-Hubbell has been quietly testing its own networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected, which it plans to launch publicly late this year or early in 2009.

The company made much ado earlier this month about its partnership with professional networking site LinkedIn. But it has operated in virtual stealth mode with respect to its own networking site. A story yesterday on Law.com mentioned it but provided no details. An ABA Journal story this month about Martindale's online plans said nothing about it. Blogger Heather M. Milligan wrote about it last week at The Legal Watercooler, but declined to share any details. The most complete description so far comes from the project's lead manager, John Lipsey, LexisNexis vice president of corporate counsel services, writing in the August issue of The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel.

A beta version of the site with limited functionality is, in fact, now operating. Martindale has invited a small number of lawyers to register for the site as beta testers. While I am not one of them, I was recently given a tour of the live site by Lipsey and shown slides of additional features to be added prior to launch.

As Lipsey's job title suggests, corporate counsel are a central focus of the company's plans for developing the site. "One of my primary focuses now is to concentrate on the needs of corporate counsel in developing the relationship, community and tools aspects of this," Lipsey told me.

Those three components – relationships, community and tools – form the three overlapping circles that will come together in the final release version of Martindale-Hubbell Connected (MHC). All three are essential, Lipsey believes, if the site is to attract and retain legal professionals.

"One of the biggest differences in a successful professional networking site is that a social one doesn't really engage a professional in any meaningful, long-term way," Lipsey says. "We need to build business tools to help them do their jobs more efficiently and effectively."

Familiar Interface

Upon first logging in to MHC, the view is familiar to anyone who has used a networking site such as LinkedIn. For my tour, Lipsey logged in under his account, taking us to his main profile page, which showed his professional profile, his network of connections, his groups, and a running stream of updates from others with whom he is connected.

Here is our first glimpse of the potential power of a networking site built by a company with deep roots in the business of building lawyer directories. MHC includes a feature that suggests people you may know and therefore may want to connect with. In itself, this is not unique; other sites do this.

But MHC's suggestion tool digs deep, looking for connections not only among MHC registrants but also within Martindale-Hubbell's full database of more than 1 million lawyers and within the LexisNexis database of judicial opinions. That means it will suggest connections not merely from among workplace colleagues or law school classmates, but also from among lawyers you argued with or against in a courtroom.

Needless to say, as a networking tool, this is powerful. It enables a user to quickly build a network beyond one's obvious connections. Why does this matter? Because as you create your network, Lipsey explains, there are many people who may not readily come to mind but who would welcome an initiation to connect.

"This million-plus database has generated 45 million connections," Lipsey says. "That is 45 million instances of suggested connections among lawyers we think may want to be connected with each other."

As you might expect, this is not the only way in which MHC integrates with the Martindale-Hubbell directory. Another is in the directory itself. Say a corporate counsel searches the directory for a litigation attorney in Boston. If that counsel is an MHC member, then the results screen will include a "My Network" tab showing lawyers who both match the search and are within the member's first- and second-degree network.

As of the late-July date of my tour, MHC had been in beta testing for only a matter of weeks and its functionality remained limited. Other features included an "inmail" system for sending member-to-member messages and a rudimentary legal news page. MHC launched with 20 beta testers and had just over 100 as of my tour.

Communities of Interest

While development so far has focused on the "relationships" circle, the next stages will build out the community and tools aspects of the site, Lipsey said.

The community prong will allow members to create controlled-access communities of interest within MHC based on their own criterion. A legal organization, for example, could create a community, or a community might focus on a particular city or state.

Other communities will be created automatically. A broad corporate counsel community will include all lawyers who work in-house. As new members join who work for a particular company, that company will automatically get its own community, accessible only by others who work there.

As Lipsey envisions them, these communities will feature content drawn from a variety of sources, some generated by users, some drawn from LexisNexis, some from members' law firms, and some from outside sources. They could include discussion groups, forums, blogs, webinars and more, and even house sub-communities with more specialized interests.

Another aspect of MHC's community prong will be community publishing in the form of a Wikipedia-like legal reference. This will be a legal reference guide collaboratively written and edited by MHC's members.

But understanding the inertia that accompanies a blank slate, Martindale with "pre-seed" the wiki with the content from its Martindale-Hubbell Law Digest, lawyer-written digests of the laws of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Another feature will be knowledge centers focused on the areas of law in which corporate counsel are most interested, such as labor and employment, insurance, litigation and intellectual property. These centers will include a variety of content drawn from CLE programs, webinars, published articles and elsewhere.

Tools for Corporate Counsel

The final prong in all this is to create useful tools, with a particular eye to corporate counsel.

One such tool will be client reviews – ratings and reviews of outside counsel designed to assist in-house lawyers with making hiring decisions. These reviews are more detailed than Martindale's familiar peer review ratings. They provide at-a-glance overviews of a lawyer's quality of service, value for the money, responsiveness and communications.

As in-house counsel review lawyers' profiles in the Martindale directory, they will be invited to provide ratings of those with whom they have worked. Martindlae will have checks in place to ensure the validity of these reviews, but the identities of the actual reviewers will be kept anonymous. This feature will be available through both MHC and the public directory.

Another tool in the works is aimed at facilitating legal department management of preferred providers. While some companies already have sophisticated processes in place for this function, most do not, Lipsey believes.

Each MHC member who works in-house will be able to create a personal preferred-provider list that will become part of the member's standard MHC dashboard. As other lawyers from within the same company build their own lists, each can get access not only to their own, but also to a "master" list of preferred providers.

The usefulness of this master list is that it shows not only names, but also which of them your colleagues are actually using and who among your colleagues is using them. In this way, counsel need not rely solely on a lawyer's public rating, but also can tap into the institutional knowledge of others within a company.

"This is leveraging technology for a business purpose," Lipsey says. "I may be able to see a lawyer's public rating, but I care more about ratings from people I work with. Here's a way we can provide that."

In conjunction with this, MHC is considering adding the ability to lift the anonymity of client ratings by direct request. This would allow a member to request an introduction to the reviewer of a particular lawyer and allow the reviewer to decide whether to accept.

Also part of this preferred provider tool is the ability to send messages to the lawyers on the list, either limited to selected recipients or broadcast to all, and to send custom surveys to preferred providers and monitor results.

A final component of MHC will be an RFP builder. MHC will provide templates for building proposal requests and a tool for aggregating and reviewing responses.

Lipsey believes that Martindale-Hubbell's established position within the legal community will enable it to build a superior professional networking tool.

"We're putting resources to bear that only an established company can know to produce," he says. "The ability to know when two lawyers have come up against each other in a case is pretty technologically remarkable.

"From a networking perspective, that's valuable. And that's just one flavor of expertise we can bring to bear in the professional networking world."

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 3:11 PM, , links to this post

Thursday, July 17, 2008
New Blog: 'The LinkedIn Lawyer'

Boston lawyer David A. Barrett, who claims to have the "world's largest LinkedIn lawyer network," has launched a blog, The LinkedIn Lawyer, devoted to answering other lawyers' questions about the professional-networking site. In a recent post, he explains his claim to the world's largest lawyer network:
"'The World's Largest LinkedIn Lawyer Network' refers to how many lawyers are in my personal, directly connected network which currently consists of 3400+ members and 1450+ lawyers."
Barrett says that he believes the most-connected lawyer on LinkedIn is Los Angeles lawyer Martin S. Rudoy. Somehow reminds me of that old saw, "He who dies with the most toys wins."

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 9:28 PM, , links to this post

Sunday, June 08, 2008
Article on Social Networking Sites for Lawyers

Law.com has my Law Technology News column for this month, Social Networking May Pay Off in the End. This is the first of two parts looking at social networking sites of interest to legal professionals. This month's focuses on sites open to a range of members. Next month's will zero in on sites that focus on legal professionals.

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posted by Robert Ambrogi @ 9:29 PM, , links to this post