Law firms have empirically been a pretty conservative group, and they are not usually known for embracing technological fads very quickly, if at all.
This is why it is all the more surprising that Bloomberg reported yesterday that social networking sites, including Facebook and Linkedin, are becoming crucial to firms in drumming up new business and ultimately helping attorneys becoming better lawyers.
“Many lawyers believe that social networks are no more than the playthings of their teenage offspring,” Richard Susskind, the author of numerous books on legal technology, said in an interview. “I disagree. The business-oriented versions will fundamentally change the way law firms are chosen and the way lawyers work with their clients.”
Susskind’s predictions have already started to come true. Sites like LinkedIn, which are geared toward business in general and other, legal-community specific sites, such as Legal OnRamp, are providing opportunities for lawyers never before imagined. Legal OnRamp, founded in 2007, is an invitation-only networking site that offers legal blogs, guest commentaries, and private discussion spaces for members to seek advice from lawyers in other jurisdictions about everything from billing rates to local judge preferences. The site boasts almost 10,000 members, among them Latham and Watkins, the Los Angeles Angels baseball team, and the Royal Bank of Canada. The site even provides members a workspace where lawyers can have their work reviewed by other site members. One in-house counsel publicly announced last month that he now drafts his own patent applications before submitting them to the pricier lawyers down the street at the outside counsel for final review.
Sites like these are helping firms connect with expert witnesses too, as one lawyer observed.
“Online networks are a fantastic tool for identifying expertise in the fields in which general counsel are looking to rein in outside counsel,” Eugene Weitz, an in-house attorney at Paris-based Alcatel Lucent, said in an interview. “Experts bubble up who have the ability to show their knowledge online.
Certainly, the explosion of social networking is a double-edged sword. When cash-strapped in-house counsels can now get many of their questions answered online for free, rather than paying hundreds of dollars per hour, this has the potential to cut in to law firm bottom lines. Also, will be harder for firms to hide behind their reputations. “Increasingly the key piece of information a general counsel uses to assess an outside lawyer’s reputation is not the renown of his or her firm, but the review by a trusted peer,” noted Lippe, the CEO of Legal OnRamp.
A recent LexisNexis practitioner survey reported that 40% of lawyers surveyed think that online networking sites will alter the legal business and practice of law in the next five years. Frankly, this number seems shockingly low, perhaps attributable to the significant generation gap also reported by Lexis. The survey found that older practitioners are much less likely to be using a social network in their practice than their younger associates.
In any case, it will be fascinating to watch how firms’ internal operations adjust and respond to these new social networks. At the very least, these social networks have the capacity to foster collaboration and communication, both within firms as well as between them, which ultimately should go a long way toward providing better legal services to clients.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks