Social Media Primer for Lawyers (Part 3)

By Debra Bruce, J.D.

In the first post in the Social Media Primer for Lawyers series, we covered an overview of blogging and Facebook. In Part 2 we introduced LinkedIn and Twitter. In this Part 3 of the series, we’ll give an overview of several social media sites especially designed for lawyers.

5. Legal OnRamp www.LegalOnRamp.com

Legal OnRamp describes itself as “a Collaboration system for in-house counsel and invited outside lawyers and third party service providers.” Think of it as a LinkedIn for the legal industry. You can request an invitation to join Legal OnRamp from a link on the homepage, where you will be directed to complete and submit an application. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a response, however. It’s more effective to find someone you know who is a member of Legal OnRamp, and ask them to send you an invitation to join.

The site has a number of features that lawyers may find useful:
a) profiles of the members
b) display of several legal blogs
c) discussion groups
d) a section for posting news and updates
e) a collaborative wiki for posting templates, sample agreements and surveys
f) links to articles on Law.com and InsideCounsel
g) a rolling job posting display

While Legal OnRamp has only about 10,000 members, it has a concentration of in-house counsel, which makes it a valuable networking site for both inside and outside counsel. In May 2009, FMC Technologies announced that its RFP process for litigation counsel would be coordinated on Legal OnRamp, with all its responses to questions about the process being provided only in its discussion group created there.

6. Texas Bar Circle https://texasbar.affinitycircles.com/sbot/home

Texas Bar Circle is the social media network restricted to members of the State Bar of Texas. It also resembles LinkedIn. It contains discussion groups, job postings, event announcements and opportunities to connect with other Texas Bar members. Any user can start a discussion group, which can be open or restricted. Groups have formed based on practice areas, geographic regions, law schools and interests outside of law. Bar Circle members report that they appreciate the opportunity to ask questions of other lawyers, engage in professional discussions, share resources and develop relationships with lawyers they didn’t know before.

7. Martindale-Hubbell Connected www.martindale.com/connected

Martindale-Hubbell Connected is another LinkedIn-like social network targeted specifically for attorneys. In fact, there is a feature to allow you to see which of your LinkedIn connections are also members of Connected, so that you can invite them to join Connected. Any attorney can join for free, and other legal professionals are also permitted to join. It is not necessary to have a Martindale.com subscription. Martindale announced in September 2009 that Connected had achieved 15,000 members.

The site sports member profiles, blogs by members, affinity groups, discussion forums and legal news updates. There is a place to make announcements, as well. None of these features are very actively used as of this writing, at least by comparison to LinkedIn and other more established networks. A quick perusal of the attorneys in Houston, Texas on Connected in October 2009 revealed that the majority of them had 0 connections established. Some conferences are creating private groups for their participants to download documents and connect with each other on Connected.

8. AVVO

AVVO describes itself as a website to provide guidance to consumers in choosing a lawyer. AVVO compiles profile information and ratings of lawyers from state bar records, self-disclosure, peer reviews and client reviews. AVVO has its own formula for calculating its ratings, which range from 1 to 10. It also has

It also has how-to legal guides for consumers, and a question and answer section where lawyers answer consumer questions. Attorneys have the opportunity to showcase their expertise through posting guides and answering questions. AVVO also awards attorneys “levels” based on how active and helpful they are on the site.

AVVO is not really a networking site, but it is based on user-generated content. It does give lawyers a chance to connect with other lawyers by posting endorsements of them, and to interact with potential clients by answering questions. Lawyers should check their profiles to make sure they are aware of what clients and other lawyers may be saying about them.

The AVVO site and its rating system have been controversial. A number of commentators have criticized AVVO for giving poor ratings to prominent attorneys, and “no concern” ratings to lawyers who have been sanctioned by their bar association or convicted of a crime. It also has its proponents, who laud the free directory listing. It provides an inexpensive opportunity to establish an Internet presence to small firm attorneys, in contrast to the expensive directories like www.lawyers.com and www.findlaw.com.


9. JD Supra www.JDSupra.com

JD Supra is an online repository of legal documents, forms and articles. Why would you want to post anything there? Here are a few reasons:

a) Some lawyers who have posted articles have been contacted to write a similar article for a legal publication, garnering more publicity and name recognition.

b) JD Supra has an application that can make your publications come up in a list in your Facebook profile, thereby making it easier to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise to your Facebook connections.

c) JD Supra tweets about postings on Twitter in subject-specific newsfeeds. That enhances your reach to your target audience. JD Supra already has established followers in the relevant industries on Twitter, and they retweet what they like, to their network of followers.

d) JD Supra feeds articles into relevant LinkedIn interest groups, as well.

e) It helps to level the playing field, showcasing solo and small firm articles right along with those of the BigLaw firms. A number of BigLaw firms post their firm newsletters and alerts on JD Supra.

For more information about the benefits of JD Supra, Gina F. Rubel wrote a good article in The Legal Intelligencer Blog.

10. Lawlink www.LawLink.com

LawLink bills itself as “the first social network for the legal community.” The members are restricted to lawyers, law students, expert witnesses and law professionals. Members can post documents, like at JD Supra, and link to their blogs, similar to LinkedIn. They can also participate in discussion groups and post or answer questions, like on LinkedIn.

LawLink incentivises participation by giving points for posting documents, questions, answers, and other items. Members of LawLink are listed in order of their accumulated points. The home page showcases four “featured attorneys” for a month, who gain that honor by being the most prolific poster of the month.

The features are actually pretty nice on LawLink, but the participation is not very robust. At the time of this writing, lawyers looking for a social medium designed for lawyers would find more action at Legal OnRamp.

We have discussed the “Big 3” of social media networking: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. We’ve also discussed social networking sites especially relating to lawyers. And yet there’s more. So much more. Keep watching for another post about social media sites attorneys may want to know about.


Debra L. Bruce is President of Lawyer-Coach LLC (www.lawyer-coach.com), a law practice management coaching and training firm. She practiced law for 18 years before becoming a professionally trained Executive Coach. She is a former Vice Chair of the Law Practice Management Committee of the State Bar of Texas, and past leader of Houston Coaches, Inc., the Houston Chapter of the International Coach Federation. She welcomes your comments below.

Social Media Primer for Lawyers (Part 2)

By Debra Bruce, J.D.

In the last post we began an introduction to various social media from the perspective of lawyers. That post discussed blogs and Facebook. This post continues the series by introducing lawyers to LinkedIn and Twitter.

3. LinkedIn www.LinkedIn.com

Although LinkedIn has a smaller membership (over 50 million) than Facebook, the members are primarily white-collar business professionals. A LinkedIn profile looks like a resume on steroids. You are invited to post your current position, former positions, and education. You can fill the summary section with a search-term rich description of your practice, and you can incorporate your blog, slide show presentations and other features. Your LinkedIn page may get better search engine ranking than your website! If you still don’t have a website, get on LinkedIn so that at least you will exist when prospective clients or referral sources search for you on the web.

Like Facebook, LinkedIn has a place to post short status updates. Because it is entirely appropriate to toot your own horn on LinkedIn, this is a good place to publicize an award you just received, a trial you won, an article that got published or anything else that enhances your professional reputation.

Like Facebook, you can invite people to link to you, but with a kicker. When your old classmates or colleagues connect to you, there’s a good chance they will review your profile. If you have constructed it carefully, they will be reminded of the ways you can help them. Then your status updates will help keep you top of mind when they have a need. A lot of people have gotten business just from reconnecting with old contacts as they built their LinkedIn network.

Once you get about 100 connections, LinkedIn becomes even more valuable because it operates on the “six degrees of separation” theory. Let’s say there is a company that you want to do a little reconnaissance on. You might want to know how to best approach them as a prospective client, get a job there, or find their weak spots as a litigation opponent. When you search on the company name, LinkedIn will not only show you everyone you are connected to who works there or used to work there, it will also show you which of your friends knows someone like that.

Like Facebook, LinkedIn has groups that you can join that share common interests. In those groups you can raise your visibility among potential clients and referral sources who are members of the group by answering questions or posting some of your own to get a discussion going. Keep in mind the usual ethical caveats if you answer legal questions, and shy away from posting questions about legal issues in a public forum. Examples of a few questions that might generate discussion without making you look bad include (i) how have you found LinkedIn to be beneficial, (ii) if you have used a virtual assistant, what was your experience, and (iii) what positive trends or changes do you see coming out of these challenging times.

4. Twitter www.Twitter.com

Twitter is called a micro-blogging site because posts cannot exceed 140 characters, and the user’s profile description can’t exceed 180. It evolved from a mechanism for people to text multiple friends at once to keep tabs on each other, so they could meet up or alert each other to something cool going on. Today, however, Twitter is has become the fastest way to get up-to-the-minute news on any topic. Observers “tweet” the news as it happens, as previously described regarding the June 2009 Iranian election. It also garners attention for newsworthy events that mainstream media may have ignored.

Twitterers share information, often with links to blog posts with more in-depth discussion. If your followers find your comment interesting, amusing or informative, they will “retweet” it to their followers. Thus, your posts can very quickly go viral, and if it contains a link to related information on your website or blog, Twitter can drive a lot of traffic there. If you have a message you want to get out to a lot of people, or if you want more traffic to your website, it pays to develop a lot of Twitter followers.

Twitter can help lawyers to build a reputation for expertise and create valuable relationships with potential clients and referral sources by joining conversations in an arena with very few barriers. Twitter has been described as a giant cocktail party where you can join a conversation on any subject that interests you. Just like at a cocktail party, you make new acquaintances and can follow up with them later in a more private forum.

The culture of the “Twitterverse” is open and collaborative, allowing you to connect with (or at least eavesdrop on) people who probably wouldn’t take your phone call. For example, on July 10, 2009, the new CEO of General Motors, Fritz Henderson, spent half an hour answering questions on Twitter about the products and direction of the “new” post-bankruptcy GM.

The Twitterverse has its own etiquette, which frowns on flagrant self-promotion, and favors helping others and reciprocation. Since those values support relationship building, and relationship building lies at the core of effective marketing of professional services, Twitter can be a valuable tool for lawyers.

Twitter neophytes often find it confusing. That’s mainly because the Twitter structure is actually rather skeletal, and users rely on a myriad of external applications to make it function in the way they want to use it. Just enter “top Twitter apps” into your favorite search engine, and read a few blog posts to find some applications that will make Twitter easier to understand. For some quick guides, check out Twitter 101 by LegalTypist, Inc. and The Ultimate Guide to Everything Twitter by Webdesigner Depot. To really learn about the power of Twitter in detail and in an efficient manner, read the book Twitter Power by Joel Comm.

The most common misconception about Twitter is that you will just waste your time reading about what someone had for breakfast. Yes, some foodies and narcissists will post about what they eat. However, you won’t “hear” what they have to say, unless you follow them. If their conversation bores you, walk away! Only follow people (your “tweeps”) who tweet on topics you care about.

Here is a brief list of essential applications and sites for attorneys experimenting with Twitter. This list just scratches the surface, but it’ll help you get off to a good start.

Tweetdeck. This popular application helps you manage the conversation flow of the people you follow. You can segregate tweeters into columns by interests, locations, friends, favorites, or any other category that helps you sort for the tweets you really want to read. This becomes more important as you increase the number of people you follow. Tweetdeck also has an iPhone app to keep your tweets organized on the road.

Tweetbeep. You can use this app to alert you by email when someone sends you a message, mentions your name, or mentions any other subject you want to react to promptly. This tool is essential for lawyers who don’t check Twitter frequently, and might miss someone’s effort to contact them or compliment their tweet.

Lextweet. A site that follows the tweets of lawyers and other members of the legal community who register with the site. See what your peers are saying.

Twellow. Breaks tweeters down by industry based on what they registered under. Find people to follow in your clients’ industry or in the legal industry.

WeFollow. Another service that categorizes twitterers to help you find who to follow.

By now you have plenty to experiment with, and yet “social media for lawyers” encompasses so much more. The next post will discuss some social media venues that specifically relate to lawyers.

Debra L. Bruce is President of Lawyer-Coach LLC (www.lawyer-coach.com), a law practice management coaching and training firm. She practiced law for 18 years before becoming a professionally trained Executive Coach. She is a former Vice Chair of the Law Practice Management Committee of the State Bar of Texas, and past leader of Houston Coaches, Inc., the Houston Chapter of the International Coach Federation. She welcomes your comments below.

Social Media Primer for Lawyers (Part 1)

By Debra L. Bruce, J.D.




Unless you live in a cave, you have probably been hearing about social media lately. Many lawyers dismiss social media as just something that kids do. Others recognize that many adults use social media, but claim that it’s a waste of time for lawyers. Some lawyers even concede that using some social media might benefit their practice, but assert that there are too many risks associated with it.

Lawyers made similar claims about the internet and email in the 1990’s. Today most of us can’t even practice, if our access to internet and email goes down.

Just as the internet and email changed the way we do business, today social media are transforming our world. The cover of the April 2009 issue of Fast Company Magazine ran the title “The Kid Who Made Obama President: How Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes Unleashed Barack’s Base - and Changed Politics and Marketing Forever.” The cover story for the June 5, 2009 issue of Time Magazine was titled “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.”

In June 2009 hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets in Iran protesting the official pronouncement of election results. The government confined foreign journalists to their hotels and arrested those who attempted to report on the violent repression of the protests. Dissidents were able to get news out to the world, however, by posting up-to-the-minute reports, photos and even videos on Twitter through their cell phones.

This is the first in a series of articles intended to help any reformed members of the “Luddite Lawyers League” to take some steps toward the social media age. The series will briefly overview several different types of social media and how lawyers use them to build, enhance and maintain connections with existing clients, former clients and prospective clients. This is just an introduction to a vast topic.

1. Blogs

Lawyers may use many different social media strategies to demonstrate their expertise and to increase their visibility to the public. Blogs rest at the core of most social media strategies, because activities in other media can include links pointing back to a blog. Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, favor blogs because their content gets updated frequently, and that content more reliably relates to the search terms used to find it. That in turn makes the search engine more useful and popular. So blogs get extra weight in search engine algorhythms.

Many lawyers fear that if they develop a blog, they’ll have to spend hours posting to it daily. In reality, even monthly posts on a topic that your clients care about, and which use the terms they search on, will improve your website’s search engine ranking (If your firm doesn’t have a website, you need to read my article “No Lawyer Left Behind.”)

Some lawyers fear that blog posts require public stances on issues that may come back to haunt them. Opposing counsel may use it against you if you later argue differently on behalf of a client. A potential client may judge your pronouncements to be contrary to their interests, and decide not to hire you after reviewing your blog.

Those are definitely risks associated with opinionated blogs. Opinionated blogs that spark controversy often attract more readers, but that’s not the only way to blog. You can reduce the risk of needing to eat your words by filing posts that attempt to inform, rather than persuade. Write like an old-fashioned journalist. They communicated the facts and reasons why those facts might hold interest for the reader, but strove to remain unbiased in their reporting. Focus on making your blog a valuable resource that updates your readers on recent developments in the law and answers common legal questions.

Some of the most popular blogging platforms are free, such as Wordpress, Typepad, and Blogger. There are also a number of companies that specialize in helping lawyers create blogs, such as LexBlog and Blawging Lawyers. If you aren’t ready to take the plunge, however, consider just writing some guest posts on the blog of someone you know, in order to get your toes wet.

2. Facebook www.facebook.com

Facebook allows members to post thoughts, status updates, pictures and videos in their own profiles, and make public comments (on the “wall”) in the profiles of their “friends” or send them private messages. “Friends” are people that they have agreed to connect with on Facebook.

Facebook started with college students, and therefore has a casual and personal tone. It is “growing up,” however, with over 200 million members now. According to statistics reported by iStrategyLabs, users over age 55 make up Facebook’s fastest growing U.S. demographic. They have grown 513% so far in 2009.

Facebook includes many other applications, many of which were created by external developers. Some are rather silly games and surveys. Others, such as the ability to post events, blogs and classified ads, have useful purposes for attorneys. Facebook provides many opportunities to show your casual side, which helps to humanize the perception of lawyers. That can help to increase your “know, like and trust” factor for client development.

Businesses can also join Facebook, and the business profiles are called “pages.” Two examples of Texas law firms that have Facebook pages include Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr, P.C. and Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. Facebook members can choose the level of privacy related to their profiles, and Fulbright only allows “friends” to enter its Facebook page, but the Munsch Hardt page is open to the public. The Mashable blog has a good post about using Facebook’s privacy settings.

Many smaller law firms and individual lawyers have personal Facebook pages and profiles. Why would a lawyer choose to have a Facebook profile? With 200 million members worldwide, it makes sense to “go fishing where the fish swim.”

One great advantage to using Facebook: your kids can teach you how to use it. ;-)

Next time: LinkedIn and Twitter.

© 2009 Debra L. Bruce


Debra L. Bruce is President of Lawyer-Coach LLC (www.lawyer-coach.com), a law practice management coaching and training firm. She practiced law for 18 years before becoming a professionally trained Executive Coach. She is a former Vice Chair of the Law Practice Management Committee of the State Bar of Texas, and past leader of Houston Coaches, Inc., the Houston Chapter of the International Coach Federation. She welcomes your comments below.