Tag: Facebook

Social Networking for the Legal Profession

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I just finished reading Social Networking for the Legal Profession by Penny Edwards and Lee Bryant. They were nice enough to send me a copy.

Penny and Lee used a few quotes from me, referred to some of my writings and used some of my social networking activity as examples. That poor judgment aside, the book is otherwise a great report on how legal professionals can take advantage of online networking tools.

The book contains practical examples and strategies. They explore the use of the tools externally as part of your marketing and business development efforts. They also explore the use of them internally for operations, communication, and knowledge management 2.0. They present a good road map with lots of options for an organization to chose among.

They start with the basics and run through a survey of the social networking sites most useful to lawyers: LinkedIn, Avvo, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Legal OnRamp, Martindale-Hubbell Connected, JD Supra and many others.

It is not all kumbaya. The report takes into account the risks and challenges you must overcome to make implementation a success. They spend significant time talking about the culture challenges. They also explore the security, privacy and compliance issues.

Penny and Lee point out the paradigm shift with these tools. Unlike previous generations of collaboration tools, these 2.0 tools target individual benefits rather than the benefits to the organization as a whole. They focus on what’s in it for the individual. The benefits to the larger organization are a by-product. There is less emphasis on standardization and centralization.

The focus on standardization and the collective benefits was what knowledge management got wrong. The big central databases of knowledge management were useful to the organization as a whole, but provided little benefit to the individual contributor. They did not want awards or financial compensation (not that more money wouldn’t hurt), but wanted a way to help organize their own stuff in a way that was useful to them.

Unlike past generations of software, most of the innovation is coming from the consumer space. Free tools on the web are far ahead of enterprise systems. IT departments are constantly being asked why its so easy to search on Google or publish on the web, but so much harder to do so inside the law firm. If you want to know how these tools can help you inside your organization, you need to try them outside your organization.

There is a great chapter on the benefits of networking tools used inside the organization and how to achieve great benefits.

The book is expensive. The Ark Group gave it a cover price of £245. It is a great book and worth the price. If you are interested, I was given the details of a discount offer, taking $115 off the price, making it $285 plus $10 shipping. The details are on the US publicity flyer for Social Networking for the Legal Profession (.pdf).

You can read more from Penny, Lee and others at Headshift on the Headshift blog.

I thought I would also share links to some of my material that Penny and Lee cite in the book:

Top Ten Mistakes Lawyers Make with Social Media

social-media-expert

Lawyers and law firms are rapidly adopting social media to market themselves and connect with peers. These are new tools. We are all trying to figure out how to use them. Just to make it more difficult, the tools themselves are rapidly evolving as we are learning how to use them.

Some lawyers are doing a great job using them. Some are doing a terrible job.

I thought I would share my thoughts on the mistakes I see.

10. Blocking access. Social media provides a rich source of information about clients, potential clients, opposing counsel, witnesses and other parties. It easy to get around the block with a mobile device or home access. Blocking is just an annoyance. It’s not an effective policy.

9. Failing to have a social media policy. People in your law firm are using social media. They may only using if for personal purposes. But if they identify your firm as their employer, what they do has an effect on the image of your firm.

8. Ignoring Facebook as a recruiting tool. “You do better fishin’ where the fish are.” Many summer associates are creating groups on their own. Your firm would be better off if they administered the group.

7. Not giving authorship to blog posts. The attorneys writing the story should get credit for the story. This gives an attorney an extra incentive to contribute and showcases their skills.

6. Not linking. A blog is much more useful to its readers and its authors if it links to other relevant information. There is no reason not to link to primary source material like statutes and regulations online. Link to other news sources, websites and blogs. Yes people will leave leave your site through those links. But they are more likely to come back if your site is the better source of information.

5. Failing to understand ethical limitations. The bar regulators have barely dealt with web 1.0, never mind the additional issues around web 2.0. Keep in mind that most social media activities can be considered advertising.

4. Abandoning without notice. Nothing lasts forever. If you started a blog and are not posting any more. Put a post saying you’ve stopped or are on hiatus. (This is what I did for my old KM Space blog.)

3. Failing to leverage LinkedIn. You should have a profile in LinkedIn that has at least as much information as the bio on your firm’s site. You should also be leveraging LinkedIn to stay up to date with the movement of your clients and former client contacts. LinkedIn is a great source of information for CRM systems.

2. Posting information about clients. As with any advertising, make sure you get written consent from clients before posting any information about your work with them.

1. Not using social media. The biggest mistake most lawyers are making with social media is not using these tools.  They are here to stay. Get used to it.

What mistakes to you see being made?

Image is from Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid – “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: you’re a social media specialist?

Social Media and Your Compliance Program

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Bill Piwonka, Amanda Mayhew and Rodica Buzescu from EthicsPoint gave a webinar on social media and compliance. These are my notes:

The presentation started with a user poll on the approach to social media at the attendees’ organizations:

  • 27% block all social media sites
  • 42% block a few social media sites
  • only 29% allow all social media sites

In a second question, I was surprised to see that 37% of the attendees said they were using some form of Web 2.0 in their ethics program. That seemed like a big number to me.

Bill started off with a brief discussion of his view of web 2.0 and social media. He also highlighted some of the approaches and tools used by EthicsPoint. He moved on to the need of companies to monitor their brand. It easy for customers, employees and competitors to craft your brand for you (and not in the way you want). You need to know what is being said and be prepared to respond when necessary.

On the call, 11% of the attendees did not use any social media platform, 11% used one, and 40% used 2 or three. The rest (like me) used more.

Why should compliance care about Social Media? It is here to stay. Generation Y and the Millennials grew up an learned in the world of social media. They enter business organizations and are cut off from the tools they used to learn and communicate.

Rodica took over and shared her perspective. She is new to EthicsPoint. When she started, she was cut off from her networks since they blocked Facebook, instant messaging and many other social media tools.

Amanda took over and gave her perspective as the general counsel and privacy officer at EthicsPoint. She pointed out that younger workers may not have been in the business environment long enough to realize that there are limits on what you can say outside the organization and inside the organization. EthicsPoint focuses on privacy and protection of their clients information. They have a tight policy on social media to protect that information.

Bill stepped up and pointed out that you cannot ignore social media. Even if you block access, employees can easily access them from a mobile device or home. Blocking is not an effective policy. You need to let your employees know what they can and cannot do. You need a policy. Bill used Intel’s Social Media Guidelines as an example.

Bill also pointed out that even if the company does not want to engage in social media, they need to monitor what is being said about your company in social media. You also want to make sure that someone else does not use your brand on social media platforms.

Amanda came back to emphasize a few points. It is important to make it clear what is confidential and what is not public. Another point was to be respectful, realizing that your mother, friends and boss may ready what you say. Anonymity is also a hot button for her.

What can you do? How can compliance professionals use Social Media?

Create a Facebook group for your compliance team. Allow people to see who you are and develop a relationship and trust.

Use YouTube to host and distribute training videos. Why buy expensive video hosting servers and software when YouTube will do it for free.

Best Buy uses a blog to make ethics a completely transparent dialogue.  Best Buy’s Chief Ethics Officer blogs on actual ethics and incidents at Best Buy. Of course, she does not use real names and disguises identifying information.

Use web 2.0 for professional development by joining online communities focused on ethics and compliance issues. EthicsPoint has user forums focused on its product.

In the Q&A there was a lot of discussion about how much to monitor and how much to limit. “Ignorance is not bliss.”

Another issue that came up in Q&A is who to friend on Facebook and who to make connections with on LinkedIn. In particular in the educational environment it is very tricky to friend or not friend. There is a similar dynamic in the workplace.

What about productivity? Does Facebook turn you into a slacker? Does blogging make you less useful? Bill turned this around and gave example of how he uses these tools as part of his job. (It was an impressive list.)

How do you develop your own policy? EthicsPoint started with Intel’s Social Media Guidelines as their model.  (You can also take a look at one of my models: Blogging / Social Internet Policy.)

(In the interest of disclosure some of the material was borrowed from my presentation on Social Media at the Boston EthicsPoint Regional User Forum in Boston. Bill also noted this in the presentation)

Advertising Limitations for Investment Advisers on Social Networking Sites

While FINRA has a very strict limitation on advertisements focusing on procedures, investment advisers have a principles driven approach to limitations on advertising.

To start, an advertisement is any communication addressed to more than one person that offers (1) analysis concerning a security, (2) any information to used in making a determination to buy to sell a security, or (3) any investment advisory service with regard to securities. That means bulk emails, television ads, radio ads, websites, and social networking sites are advertisements. If you label yourself as an investment adviser in your Facebook profile, Twitter profile, or blog information, those sites are advertisements. Even if you use them solely for personal purposes, they may be considered an advertisement if you mention securities or offer your services.

Given the broad definition of advertisement, you should just assume that your activity on a social networking site is an advertisement.

Let’s focus on the things you can’t do in an advertisement and then come back to how they affect an investment adviser’s use of the internet and social networking sites. These all come from the general prohibition on fraud under Section 206 of the Investment Advisers Act.

First, you can’t have “any testimonial of any kind concerning the investment adviser or concerning any advice, analysis, report or other service rendered by such investment adviser.” That means no recommendations on LinkedIn or other social networking site. That means you would need to moderate your blog comments and delete any that seem like a testimonial or recommendation.

Second, you can’t refer to past specific recommendations of securities. However, you can separately provide a separate detailed list of all past recommendations over at least the past year, with name of the security, the date recommended, and the price at which it was recommended. You also need to include a legend that past performance is not an indication of future performance. That means you can’t advertise your past success. Effectively, you can’t cherry-pick your best performing securities recommendations. You also need to disclose all material facts necessary to avoid unwarranted inference.

Third, you can’t advertise a graph, chart, formula, or other device for use in determining which securities to buy or sell or when to do so.

Fourth, you can’t offer any report, analysis, or other service for free, unless it is actually entirely free and without any condition or obligation.

Fifth, your advertisement can’t have any untrue statement or material fact or otherwise be false or misleading.

In looking at these principles, you can’t communicate something on a web 2.0 site that you could not put in a newspaper advertisement.

There has not been any additional guidance from the SEC on the use of Web 2.0 by investment advisers.  In a speech last week, Mary Schapiro said that the SEC “hasn’t come to a resolution on the new technology.” That alone may shy investment advisers away from using web 2.0 and social networking sites.

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Ethics and Facebook

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Can a lawyer hire a third person to send a “friend request” to a witness? According to an opinion from the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Professional Guidance Committee the answer is no.

Although the information on someone’s Facebook profile is discoverable, a lawyer can’t try to access the page through deception. Although imperfect, I liked this analogy in the Bar Opinion:

The inquirer has suggested that his proposed conduct is similar to the common — and ethical — practice of videotaping the public conduct of a plaintiff in a personal injury case to show that he or she is capable of performing physical acts he claims his injury prevents. The Committee disagrees. In the video situation, the videographer simply follows the subject and films him as he presents himself to the public. The videographer does not have to ask to enter a private area to make the video. If he did, then similar issues would be confronted, as for example, if the videographer took a hidden camera and gained access to the inside of a house to make a video by presenting himself as a utility worker.

This opinion should not affect a workplace from putting a sensible policy in place for dealing with Facebook and other Web 2.0 tools.  Make sure you have a Blogging / Social Internet Policy.

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Martindale-Hubbell Connected – My Thoughts

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I have been a member of the Martindale-Hubbell Connected community for several months. I met John Lipsey, Vice President, Corporate Counsel Services for LexisNexis in September at a speaking engagement on Social Networking for Lawyers. John told the story of why Connected would be a great resource for lawyers.

The lure of Connected is the idea of combining an online networking community, the Martindale-Hubbell lawyer listings, and the enormous pool of data in the Lexis databases. Theoretically, your lawyer listing,  articles, cases, news, and people connections would be all linked together in one place. As with blogging, you could show your expertise through the stuff you write, the cases you work on, the transactions you work on and the news about you. Then you tie that all information to a central profile and connect with the people you know.

That’s a great story. They even put together this snazzy video to prove it:

But so far it is just a story.

The site is merely a social network site with a connection to Martindale-Hubbell  listings. So far there is no connection to the substantive Lexis content. Even the social networking tools are mediocre.

I was told that there are some major upgrades and changes coming soon as they plan to open Connected to a wider audience at the end of March.

To be fair, Connected is not a disaster like the ABA’s LegallyMinded. But, Connected does not have the interesting community of users and content like Legal OnRamp, a similar platform. Connected does not have the large population of users like LinkedIn and Facebook. Connected also lacks many of the rich features of LinkedIn and Facebook.

Part of Connected’s approach is create an authenticated community. So that the person is who they say they are. An interesting approach, but to me it seems like a lot of work for little value. (Perhaps they are scarred by the squatters holding LexisNexis in Twitter.) The authentication seems designed around the Martindale listing. So to start you need to be a lawyer to get. Apparently they are going to open Connected to the larger legal community sometime this summer (according to Kathleen Delaney in the comment to this post).

Frankly, I am not sold on having a gated community for a broad legal community. What would I publish or say in Connected that I would not otherwise say on this blog, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn? I am an early adopter, so maybe the general legal population would be more likely to contribute in Connected than on one of the public platforms? I am skeptical.

I have not written about Connected because there is not much to write about. It is sparsely populated and lacks content. I am one of the few non-Lexis people doing much with it. (As a curmudgeon, I mostly complain about the lack of features and the stuff that does not work.) They do replicate Compliance Building in Connected (a brilliant decision), but they have had trouble tying the posts to my Connected profile.

Lexis slapped the “beta” label on Connected because they are still working on it. Either they have a lot of work to do, or the site is intended to be mediocre.

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UPDATE: I corrected the spelling to “Hubbell.”

Online Social Networking: Is It a Productivity Bust or Boon?

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I recently had an article on Faceblocking published in the March 2009 issue of Law Practice magazine: Online Social Networking: Is It a Productivity Bust or Boon for Law Firms?

Steve Matthews and I conducted an informal poll to see if we could confirm that law firms were blocking access to social networking sites. Our theory was proven in the results. (You can download the raw survey data (.xls) if you want to see the underlying data.)

Of those responding to the survey, 45% said their firms blocked access to social networking sites. The three most blocked sites: Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Those are also 3 of the top 10 most visited sites on the web. We also published some of written comments from the survey respondents: Speaking Out on Social Networking.

The survey is very unscientific. Steve and I thought that it would be useful to get some data about what law firms are doing about access to social networking sites. I was surprised that 45% of firms blocked access to some social networking sites. Perhaps those working at firms subject to blocking were more likely to respond to the survey. I was also surprised that the 45% blocking percentage was fairly consistent across firm size. So small law firms were just as likely to block access as big firms.

I conducted two surveys of the summer associates at my old law firm, the vast majority went to Facebook at least once a day. It seems to me that if you are recruiting young workers, you should not cut off one of the ways they communicate. Deacons published a survey indicating that an employer’s policy regarding on-line social networking would influence a significant percentage of workers’ decision to join one employer over another.

Although I am an advocate of open access, I do so with the caveat that you need to let the people in your organization know what is proper use and to monitor their compliance. I fear that many firms use blockage as their policy. That may have worked 10 years ago, but not today. You can just as easily access these sites from iPhone or blackberry as you can from a firm computer. Blocking does not stop the bad behavior that it is trying to prevent. Blocking merely changes the access method.

There is a fair amount of research, the most prominent of which are two reports from McKinsey, showing that access to social networks at work, coupled with a good policy results in a more engaged, more motivated and potentially more innovative workplace. You should set sensible policies and set reasonable expectations for your employees. Social networking sites at their core are communications platform. You should be able to adapt your policies on email, confidentiality, marketing and similar policies to easily include social networking sites. If not, those other policies probably need updating anyhow.

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Can Facebook Get You Into Legal Trouble?

Kim S. Nash writing for CIO.com: How Text Messaging and Facebook Can Get You in Legal Trouble. The article focusing on the electronic discovery pitfalls of the ever-changing and expanding ways we communicate.

One thing is clear, banning access to social networking platforms is not effective. Even if you ban access in the workplace, your employees have access to the sites outside the workplace. What they post can be found and impact your organization.

Instead of ignoring the existence of social networking, educate and monitor. Social networking is just another way to communicate. Existing, well drafted email policies can easily be adapted to include social networking. If you shouldn’t put in an email, you should put it on a blog, Facebook or Twitter.

Some of these social networking tools allow for easier monitoring than email. Many of the platforms are designed to send out updates when new information is published. With a free RSS feed reader you can subscribe to these updates, collect them and review them.

Facebook and Airlines

British Airways and Virgin Atlantic both ran into trouble when their employees posted nasty remarks about their customers on Facebook. This raises the question about whether the companies did enough to educate their employees about the proper use of social networking.

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