It’s official: Twitter has de-throned “electronic discovery” as the most buzzworthy term at LegalTech

While the ratio of EDD vendors at the show is still extremely high, much of the talk surrounding the show revolves around Twitter and its uses and implications for lawyers.  The Monday afternoon panel, “What Is Twitter and How Can I Use It?,” covered the most practical issues raised by a room full of lawyers: How does Twitter make money? What copyright issues do we have to worry about on Twitter? How is Twitter being used to monitor real-time court proceedings?  For the full story click here.

Much attention has been lavished on the poster children of the Web 2.0 phenomenon — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like — but for many lawyers and business leaders, such consumer-led innovations seem frivolous, and have little to do with developing a law practice, new products, increasing market share or streamlining clunky business processes. Some ban Web 2.0 tools.

But there is a quiet revolution taking place, or at least that’s the message from the authors of Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom, a book we just finished.  The authors detail how companies, including General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Shell and Airbus, are busy integrating social networking into their corporate strategies. These companies, say the authors, are showing that the use of blogs, wikis, widgets and other Web 2.0 tools “encourages horizontal collaboration and harnesses the power of collective intelligence to boost productivity, foster innovation and create enhanced value”.

And Posse List members who have ventured out to do freelance work and/or establish solo practices agree.  These social networking tools have established strong associations and reach and have allowed them to build
their lives outside of normal contract work.  As several told us “The number of followers we have on Twitter, the number of friends on Facebook, the number of connections on LinkedIn all increase our “reach” and allowed
us to build independent lives”.   “Reach” is a somewhat fluid term but basically means the number of people
who read or are impacted by your message. You can have five friends at dinner, tell them something, if three of them repeat it to 2 friends each, and 5 of those people say it to one, you have an effective reach of 16 people. The more people in your network, the larger your reach.

Social media tools help us to manage those associations although Posse List members tell us they can do it “well, and sometimes not so well”.  But the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of those tools are independent of the principle.

For those of you who want more background on the utility of social media for lawyers a could place to start is Kevin O’Keeke’s site here.

We’ll have a more detailed post on social media later this month as we expand our efforts to assist contract attorneys pursuing the freelance market and solo practice option when we launch our metasite “The Ranch” for the Posse List members who have asked for information on going solo (both law practice and otherwise), working as independent contract lawyers or freelancers, etc.

There are already a large number of very well-established sites that serve as excellent resources for solo practioners and freelancers.  We can’t hope to replicate those sites so all we want to do is consolidate links to those sites for Posse List members via an internal metasite.