Tag: Lee Bryant

Positioning yourself for Tomorrow’s Social Media Today: Practical Approaches for Legal Professionals

lexisnexis

Join Compliance Building’s Doug Cornelius for a 60-minute Webinar at 11:00 am Eastern time on Wednesday, December 9. It’s free, sponsored by Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

The webinar will give you examples of social media web-based tools helping legal professionals become more efficient and productive. Will we soon say goodbye to email?

Panel

The webinar panel includes:

Summary

I will start with my hatred of the term “social media.” For me it’s all about communication, self-interest, finding information and saving that information for later use. I have no snake-oil to sell, claim no expertise as a “social media expert” and have not written a book. My part of the panel is just focused on how I personally take advantage of these tools and where I see them going.

Nicole will talk about why you should care about intermedia.

Greg show how to use web based communication  tools as information resource tools and ways to filter the information.

Rex has the perspective of social media as an opportunity aggregator, looking at Twitter, Google Wave, blogging and blog participation.

Lee will end things by looking at the social business design for the legal sector and look at how some law firms are using web-based communication internally.

You will notice that we are not talking about Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

You can register for the webinar here: http://www.interaction.com/LNMH/connected/webinars/index.cfm?wid=127

Twitter

For those of you on Twitter, we are using the #MHCO hashtag for the webinar.

Materials

The materials and some of the questions and answers are available in the Martindale-Hubble Connected group on Social Media for Lawyers. (registration required. I couldn’t get permission to post the materials publicly.)

Positioning yourself for tomorrow’s social media today: Practical approaches for legal professionals

lexisnexis

Join me for a 60-minute Webinar at 11:00 am Eastern time on Wednesday, December 9. It’s free, sponsored by Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

The webinar will give you ‘real world’ examples of social media tools helping legal professionals become more efficient and productive. The panelists will also discuss the future of social media use – will we soon say goodbye to email?

The webinar panel includes a range of legal professionals and social media experts from across the globe:

You can register for the webinar here.

Learn real world examples of how social media tools help legal professionals be more efficient. Explore the future of social media.
Topics:

  • Time management: Finding the time.
  • Personal and professional development: Ways to research, share and learn by collaboration.
  • Future uses by of social media

Social Networking for the Legal Profession

Social-networking-for-the-legal-profession

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:

Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0

At the recent LegalTech conference, Lee Bryant and May Abraham presented on Web 2.0 tool inside law firms (a/k/a Enterprise 2.0).

Lee shares his thoughts on his Headshift blog:  Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About 2.0:

In the session, we tried to get across just how easy it is to find meaningful use cases for the use of social tools inside a law firm, and the great potential for cost and time savings they present. We touched on a few Headshift cases studies including Allen and Overy, who have been using social tools for informal knowledge sharing successfully for over three years, and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, whose wiki spaces have replaced an old intranet with increasing levels of traffic and participation. But we also looked at a classic DIY ‘mashup’ approach within the Australian firm Mallesons, who have built some fantastic applications using combinations of open source and other tools.

Mary shares her thoughts on her Above and Beyond KM blog: Tales From LegalTech: Five Things Every Legal Practice Should Know About Web 2.0:

One of the reasons I agreed to participate in this session was that I’ve begun to experience the benefits of social media in my knowledge management work and could see the great potential for its use more generally in a legal practice.  There are so many things lawyers do that require the participation of others — planning and organizing throughout a matter’s life cycle, discussions with clients and other lawyers, negotiations with counter-parties, drafting legal documents, closings, post-closing compliance and clean-up, etc.   What would happen if we could use Web 2.0 tools to shift these activities out of the current paradigm of  expensive face-to-face meetings,  ineffective conference calls held while all participants are multitasking, and asynchronous e-mail exchanges?  What would change?

There are many great uses for blogs, wikis and other 2.0 tools inside the firewall of your organization (even if it is not a law firm). These 2.0 tools are very useful from a compliance perspective.

They can be useful in drafting policies. A working group can use the wiki to collaborate in creating the initial draft of a policy. You can publish a draft policy in  a blog post and let the broader audience use the blog comment feature to provide input about the policy.

These 2.0 tools generally have great search features. They should make it easier for the people in your organization to find the relevant policy. Since you can embed links in the policies, you can link to other relevant policies. It also will enable a hub and spoke approach to policies, allowing you to cross-reference policies instead of repeating similar items in multiple policies.

Most of the concerns about web 2.0 (anonymity, nasty comments, etc.) go away when the audience is your coworkers. They are also easier to deploy and easier to use that traditional technology tools.

Mary is long-time friend from my days in knowledge management. I met Lee at the 2008 Enterprise 2. o Conference. (You can see my live blogging of Enterprise 2.0 on my old KM Space blog.) Both Mary and Lee have great insights about how these tools can help your organization.