LegallyMinded – Compliance Building

The State of Legal Social Networking

I have been a long time fan of social networking for lawyers. Capturing the conversation among colleagues is one of the best ways of capturing knowledge and finding expertise. Connecting with peers is the best way to stay up-to-date on the law. That was one of the primary reasons that bar associations formed. Can these online networking opportunities be as effective as your local bar association? Are they worth your time?

Here is my take:

Martindale-Hubbell Connected
11,359 members

Currently, this appears to be the biggest social networking site focused on the legal market. So they come first in this article.

Connected is in the position of being backed by large company with significant resources and lots of substantive legal content. The site’s focus has been on creating a trusted community and validating the identity of the user. This resulted in a lengthy and error prone process for joining the site. (They just revamped the process: New Registration Workflow Launches.)

There is very little substantive legal content. The lure of this platform has been the potential of harnessing the vast Lexis database of substantive legal information to the individual. So far that potential remains untapped. The downside of having a big company behind the site is the slow speed and legacy systems that hamper the development of the site.

There are not many discussions taking place in the platform. The few discussions are focused on social networking itself. They continue that trend by devoting the week of July 20 as Social Media Policy & Guidelines Week. An interesting topic, but it will be subject to the limited audience and participants in this site. The people I would look to for guidance on this topic are not users of the platform.

If you are interested in finding out more about social media policies, the discussions next week may be interesting. But there is much more information and discussion on this topic outside the platform.

Legal OnRamp
9,242 Members

Legal OnRamp is the most innovative of these sites. It has vibrant conversations with people that I consider to be thought leaders in the business of law.

Legal OnRamp started with a focus on connecting in-house counsel with each other and giving them a platform to collaborate. Then they started allowing private practice lawyers into the platform to help with the collaboration and sharing of information.

Certainly, I joined and contributed because the platform was full of in-house counsel. At the time I joined, I was a private practice real estate lawyer. I stood out as real estate lawyer when most of the other members were focused technology practices and at technology companies. That quickly changed as the membership base grew.

The site does have robust content on substantive legal topics. They require private practice lawyers to submit FAQs on legal topics or otherwise contribute to the content and discussion on the platform. Failing to contribute gets you kicked out of the platform.

I was feeding my old blog (KM Space) into the platform. Now this blog is fed into the platform. It’s interesting to see more robust conversations take place inside Legal OnRamp than on the originating blog itself.

One of the mantras of Legal OnRamp is that the practice of law is changing, so you would expect lots of discussion about how the practice of law changing and how it should change. There are. I would prefer to see more conversation about substantive legal issues. The conversations are interesting. I would just prefer some different conversations.

Legal OnRamp also recently joined forces with the Corporate Executive Board to bring new resources to law department members of the General Counsel Roundtable, a program of the Corporate Executive Board.

Legally Minded
2,000 members

There is very little activity other than new users adding their profiles. This platform is sponsored by the American Bar Association so there was much hope that this site would be able to tie into the big store of information that the ABA holds. So far, that does not seem to be the case. The other thought would be to move some of the email discussion list-serv to the platform. That did not seem to happen.

That leaves the platform as a wasted opportunity by a large legal organization.

LawLink
5,000 Members

This platform claims to be the first social network for the legal community. I had not been to the site for months until the recently launched a Twitter Forum, pulling in Tweets from members. Other than this new forum, there is not much activity here. Being first does not make you the best.

LinkedIn
88,284 Lawyers
291,500 Attorneys
324,168 listed as being in Legal Services.

Obviously LinkedIn is not limited to the legal community. But there are hundreds of thousands of lawyers and legal industry professionals using the platform to stay connected. For years, LinkedIn groups were merely badges to add to your profile. Now they are robust communities with lots of discussions and news being shared.

The groups rival the size of the legal specific platforms above. For example the Patent Law Group on LinkedIn has almost 4,000 members. The limitation is the inability to collaborate and store information in the group.

New Social Networks for Lawyers

Omar Ha-Redeye writes on slaw.ca about two new social networks for lawyers: Lawyrs Looking for Alternative Social Networks and Social Network on Jurafide for American Clients.

Jurafide.com is a networking and marketing site that facilitates communication between U.S. clients and non-U.S. lawyers.

Lawyrs.net looks like a social networking platform for lawyers with some group discussions and legal news.

Omar signed up on Lawyrs but finds that it is missing the ability to pull in your contacts and see who you know is in the site. A fatal flaw.

I did not bother signing up for either one. Legal OnRamp seems to be the dominant site in the world of social networking in the legal field. I previously wrote about my bad experiences with LawLink and ABA’s LegallyMinded. I still hold out some hope for Martindale Hubbell Connected. So, I am skeptical that either of these two companies with no apparent connection to the US legal market can provide an interesting online networking platform.

Originally posted on KM Space.

LegallyMinded – The ABA Tries to Get Social

The American Bar Association launched LegallyMinded, a social networking site targeted at lawyers, paralegals, law librarians, law students and anyone else in the legal market. Being a student of social networks for lawyers, I thought I would sign up.

I encountered my first problem when they asked me to have a username rather than my real name. The statement was to use your real name. But they do not allow spaces in the username.Someone else had already grabbed the “dougcornelius” username. I am stuck with dougcornelius1.

The next problem was the lengthy six step sign-up process. No other site makes you add so much information. I singed in with my ABA identification so I would expect they would carry over my ABA information. I was wrong.

The next challenge was trying to connect with people. They offer an interactive map showing people with similar interests closer to you. It seemed to make little sense to me. Right next to me was someone who runs a small rural practice. Not me.

The site shows people with their username instead of their real names so it is hard to figure out who is who. My first search was to find out who joined as dougcornelius. No luck in being able to search the site for people by name. Of course their real name is hidden anyhow.

I moved on to the group function. There were two dozen in place, none of which held much interest for me. Five were focused on law students or law schools and three were focused on geography. So I set up a group for compliance since I noted Bruce Carton from Securities Docket and Compliance Week was on the site. I could not find a way to invite him to the group.

They have a blog feature so I tried that out. I copied in some posts from my Compliance Space blog to try out that feature. The publishing and editing of the blog platform is really poor.

The ABA Journal published a piece in the December 2008 issue: The ABA Gets Social.

“We set out to do something different,” says Fred Faulkner, the ABA’s manager of interactive services in Chicago. “We looked at a lot of the professional and social networks, and the gap we found was that there truly wasn’t a good site that was a cross between professional and personal networking.”

“We’re filling that gap by offering the best features of sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and adding a bunch of content from the ABA and other high-quality content sources.”

I think they missed the mark with LegallyMinded.

Bob Ambrogi is trying to test it out, but he can’t even log in: ABA Launches (Buggy) Networking Site.

Originally published on KM Space.

LegallyMinded – The ABA Tries To Get Social

They have a blog feature so I tried that out. I copied in some posts from my Compliance Space blog to try out that feature. The publishing and editing of the blog platform is really poor.

The ABA Journal published a piece in the December 2008 issue: The ABA Gets Social.

“We set out to do something different,” says Fred Faulkner, the ABA’s manager of interactive services in Chicago. “We looked at a lot of the professional and social networks, and the gap we found was that there truly wasn’t a good site that was a cross between professional and personal networking.”“We’re filling that gap by offering the best features of sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and adding a bunch of content from the ABA and other high-quality content sources.”

I think they missed the mark with LegallyMinded.

Bob Ambrogi is trying to test it out, but he can’t even log in: ABA Launches (Buggy) Networking Site.

Originally posted in KM Space, my old blog on knowledge management, enterprise 2.0, and social networking for lawyers.