Social Media At ILTA: Sharing and Collaboration Explodes at Conference

Four years ago, Kevin O’Keefe contrasted the social media activity that had already become prevalent at most technology conferences with the relative lack of such activity at the International Legal Technology Association conference. He noted some improvement in 2008, and in past years only a few sessions mentioned either social media or secure collaborative software.

This year ILTA conference saw an outpouring of social media activity in many different channels. Social media tools were embraced by the association itself, by conference co-chairs, by vendors, and by peer attendees.

There is still room for increased adoption and smart use of these channels (such as a more friendly and effective pre-conference wiki platform), but I believe that the benefits of social media to people who attended or who followed from afar were great, and that the refindability and reusability of all this content will continue to benefit ILTA members and the legal technology industry.

An earlier version of this post made invisible all but the Twitter section of this post, due to formatting errors.

Tweeting In The Halls

Perhaps the most visible change from previous years was the formalization and much broader extent of Twitter use. It was professional, not personal I’m-eating-a-sandwich tweeting. In addition to the #ilta10 conference hashtag, each session had a formally identified short and useful hash tag such as #km2; in some sessions as many as four or five people were highlighting and sharing key thoughts through twitter.

Legalerswelcom used What the Hashtag to graphically show the tweeting by day; each day with educational sessions had over 700 tweets, and there were over 3,000 for the week. I reproduce a picture of it here, because the WTH service shows the previous five-day’s tweets and the week's view will not be available soon.

And this was despite the regrettable absence of Jenn Steele, one of the twitter champions of previous conferences.

While it is essentially impossible—despite Mary Abraham’s impressive wireless keyboard-and-iPad combination—to capture as much content through tweeting as one can while live-blogging, tweets were nevertheless adequate to get a sense of the session, and to identify many of the key takeaways. Session tweeting also allowed people running late to find out which ongoing sessions had good content matching their interests. It also in many instances led to interaction between tweeters, or amplification by “retweet” by conference attendees or even those overseas of especially interesting comments or developments such as Peter Krakauer’s description of the KIIAC semi-automated agreement assessment tool.

Vendors did tweet about events and offerings, and there were some fun twitter-based giveaways / contests, but as you can tell from the “top 10 tweeters” list from WTH, above, there was not vendor abuse of the conference hashtag in any serious way.* Certainly the two on the vendor/consultant front on the "top 10 list," Legalerswelcome and InsideLegal, were adding rather than taking away value from the online conversation. I hope that such an approach will continue.

Twitter generated face-to-face social interactions as well as on-line activity. There was an initial, formal tweetup on Sunday, and a less formal but also fun “#tweetup2” on Tuesday organized by conference attendees rather than the conference itself.

Sessions About Social Media Or Enterprise 2.0

On the educational side, a dozen sessions covered social media and collaboration topics including:

Day 1, August 23

• Social Media Policy Development by Julia Montgomery and Karen Sheehan.

Day 2, August 24

• The Cloud and Law2020: Where Megatrends and Vision Collide, Super Session, Tom Kolopopulous
• SharePoint 2010 for LegalServices, Julie Kremer, Microsoft
• Transparency: Beyond the Extranet, featuring Deborah McMurray of Content Pilot LLC, Jon Parish of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, Julie Kremer of Microsoft, and Steve McHargue of Project Leadership
• Smarsh Social Networking Compliance Solution, Stephen Marsh and Sam Kolbert-Hyle of Smarsh (vendor session)

Day 3, August 25

• Improve Information Flow With Enterprise 2.0, Paul Domnick of Freshfields Bruckhaus and Mary Abraham
• Managing Information Overload Through Personal Knowledge Management, Mike McBride and Sean Brady
• Failure Leads to Success in Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
• Meaningful Metrics to Quantify ROI for KM and Enterprise 2.0 Deployments, LTC Charlotte Herring and Clark Cording, Orrick

Day 4, August 26

• How KM Supports Alternative Fee Arrangements
• Open Text Social Workplace (vendor session)
• Uniting Project Teams with Collaboration Sites

Blogging

Live blogging was made feasible, after Monday, by the generally high-quality wi-fi at the Aria resort. The conference organizers were refreshingly up front about the problems before Monday evening. Conference setup included “Click Zones” that were really designed to limit typers to a certain part of the room (understandable due to the tapping), rather than provide power. I eventually learned to simply open up a side panel in the session rooms, but it would have been better (and safer) to have power strips with taped-down extension cords available in “Click Zone.”

In addition to these other Caselines posts, the following are some of the blog posts covering the conference:

• LegalCurrent blogged about Universal Search Implementations and the Metrics for Enterprise 2.0 session that I also addressed.
• Ron Friedmann blogged about outsourcing and the keynote.
• Jason Plant a/k/a NoOption blogged about Day 1, August 23 (keynote and Office 2010), Day 2, August 24 (iManage and search), Day 3 (August 25).
• Legal IT Professionals provided a Vendor Response to ILTA Conference
• Inside Legal provided a lot of online content including this Technology Purchasing Survey

Mike McBride has collected a number of conference posts at his Delicious account. I haven't tried to be comprehensive here--comments and additions welcome, of course. And the fact that it wouldn't be easy to be comprehensive is telling.

Videos and Podcasts

Vendors and consultants are leading the way in integrating video and audio content into conference.

Legal consultants ii3 professionally produced and made available hours and hours of high-quality video known as "ILTA TV," with chats hosted by Shy Alter. Day 2 for instance featured an interview with a visiting general, along with a discussion on KM supporting legal administrative departments with knowledge management attorneys Mara Nickerson, Rachelle Renegal, and a certain bass-voiced litigation knowledge manager (at about 120 minutes in).

Over at Legal IT Professionals, Christy Burke had a number of podcast interviews with a variety of vendors and peers broken down into Days 1, 2, and 3.

Kevin Hunt of Thomson Reuters also made a number of other podcasts, including a video interview of conference co-chair Meredith Williams; the post includes a link to interviews with Patrick DiDominico, Craig Ball, and yours truly.

I also made my first podcasts, releasing by Cinch (http://www.cinchcast.com/) a podcast about the initial tweetup and another short one about showing pictures of faces in Outlook and elsewhere based on a conversation with Mr. Alter. Cinch is a really easy way to record and share short audio recordings on the iPhone or over the internet.

*occasional exception aside.

ILTA Keynote Coming Up and Sunday Social Networking "Tweetup"

Tom Koulopoulos, Founder of Delphi Group, is providing the Keynote Address tomorrow morning at the International Legal Technology Association 2009 conference, this year held in the balmy National Resort south of Washington DC along the Potomac.

Tom attended the social networking / "tweetup" event this afternoon. He seems very interested in Enterprise 2.0 and business and technology innovation and I am looking forward to his talk.

The social networking discussion that I heard at that event (I didn't get to the start) largely revolved around attorney's reaction to social networking or social media tools and processes, in particular, around attorney's concerns about the ethical and proper professional use of these tools as reflected in social media policies. Some bar associations are more restrictive than others around their attorney's use of these tools.

My belief is that these types of concerns tend to be greatly ameliorated as people get more familiar with these tools. Yes, the same types of communications that were improper or unethical if made by letter, phone, or email can be made via blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, Sharepoint wiki, or any number of other social media and Enterpise 2.0 tools. And some typical uses, such as LinkedIn recommendations or identifying oneself as an "expert" in a given type of law, may continue to be prohibited to lawyers under ethical guidelines, while remaining acceptable and appropriate for most other inhabitants of these realms.

But it should be the substance of the communication (such as one that makes the recipient reasonably believe the attorney is representing them on a legal issue when that is not the case) that is problematic, not the channel in which it appears.

A participant mentioned at the meeting that interesting examples of social media policies have been developed by IBM, the New York Times, and Intel. See also ILTA's own page on social networking, Doug Cornelius' posts on "Top Ten Mistakes Lawyers Make With Social Media" and Blogging/ Social Media Policy For a Law Firm, and the Legal Blog Watch on the Wall Street Journal's policy. There will be a session devoted to this topic on Wednesday at 1:30 (at the same time I am speaking, unfortunately) at which V. Mary Abraham, Mary Hoskins and Honora Wade are speaking.

LinkedIn for Lawyers--Doubling Every Six Months

An attorney at my firm recently asked me, in effect, if I thought LinkedIn was sufficiently professional that it would not embarrass her if she joined.

I answered that, yes, it was pretty far along, and that I thought there were several hundred thousand lawyers on that service.

(I have also suggested to a KM colleague looking for work that before she did any more research or on-line work she should get herself a Linked-In profile, as the absence of one might hurt her.)

I knew that my firm had its own company profile (which has 930 current employee members, plus former employees and other hangers-on) I wanted to check my math and found this useful and graphical post from Steve Matthews at Stem Legal Web Enterprises, suggesting that there were 840,000 people in the "legal practice" category in LinkedIn as of June 2009, up from some 406,000 in December 2008.

LinkedIn is not limited to the U.S. by any means, so I ran my own search and identified 627,302 U.S. people in the "legal practice" and "legal service" industries.

Let's assume that half of these people are IT, administrative, or marketing staff (a conservative assumption, for instance, at my firm more than half of the people are lawyers). So that leaves something north of 300,000 lawyers on LinkedIn (yes I pat myself on the back).

To put that large number in context, the ABA reports (based on reports from state bar associations) that were are a total of 1,180,386 lawyers in the U.S. at the end of 2008. So we are at around 30% adoption--well past the "early adopters" and into the "early majority," the middle of the adoption curve on LinkedIn. And the rate of growth--doubling every six months, four times that of Moore's Law--cannot be sustained, because we will run out of lawyers in about a year!

I have found that LinkedIn has greatly improved lately through introducing status updates, useful groups of various kinds, and good guesses at who else I might want to be connected to. These Web 2.0 features and its ubiquity help explain its success.

Upcoming Conference on "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter"

The Boston KM Forum is putting on a longer, more involved set of discussions around the business advantages of Web and Enterprise 2.0 tools, a subject near and dear to my heart, at Bentley College next Tuesday, March 31st. I'll be there.

The speakers and talk titles are:

• Soaring with Virtual Teams: How Working At-A-Distance and Across Boundaries Can Outperform Face-to-Face, Jessica Lipnack - CEO of NetAge and co-author of Virtual Teams; see her free webinar on the same subject.
  
  (I've enjoyed Jessica's presentations at Enterprise 2.0 Boston and elsewhere, with her trademark of "stand up and tell us who you are!")
  
• IBM’s Grounds-Up Social Software Transformation, recently married Suzanne Minassian (twitter)- Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM
  
  (Lotus Connections is one of the leading Enterprise 2.0 products (or sets of products) and I look forward to hearing some more stories of its implementation.)
  
• Vital Catalyst: Social Media is Holding and Growing Audiences,
  Ken George, New Media Manager, and author of The Converstation, WBUR
  
  (I don't know Ken but WBUR has a quite sophisticated web presence and set of podcasts.)
  
• Give to Get: Real-World Dividends from Social Networking, Sadalit Van Buren, Knowledge Management Associates
  
  (Sadalit is the author of A Matter Of Degree and is a real expert in making the most of Sharepoint's Enterprise 2.0 features.)
  
  

LegalTech Report: Online Networks and the Twitter Backchannel

Moderator:

Robert Ambrogi, Journalist

Panelists:

John Lipsey, Vice President, Corporate Counsel Services, LexisNexis
Vanessa DiMauro, CEO & President, Leader Networks
Eugene M. Weitz, Corporate Counsel, Alcatel-Lucent
Olivier Antoine, Counsel, Crowell & Moring

My overall impression is that, not surprisingly, lawyers and firms are way behind the rest of the business world in terms of knowledge, comfort, and implementation of the new forms of social networking, as through LinkedIn, Legal OnRamp, or other similar platforms.

I had a vivid conversation after the session with Niki Black, a social-web-savvy food-loving attorney from Rochester NY. As was also apparent from her Twitter stream, she relayed to me she was unpleasantly surprised at the limited understanding and resistance to social networking displayed at the session. She may have had this reaction in part due to audience questions such as “What about conflicts”? and “What about attorney-client privilege?”

Other posts on this panel come from LawyerKM, Kelly Talcott, John Lipsey (podcast included),

I've collected my notes on this interesting panel organized by speaker; below that is a brief discussion of the "back channel" that arose on Twitter.

Bob Ambrogi

If you just looked at this conference, the hottest topic in technology looks like e-discovery. But outside of LegalTech, social media is an important topic. Even companies without a formal policy have employees using social media.

Of companies that have adopted it, 2/3 see improved customer satisfaction, and 2 in 5 can associate increase in sales with adoption of social media.

Only 2% of lawyers think that social media is a valuable tool for client development. Bob thinks this low percentage is due to a misunderstanding, as social media can include client recommendations, alumni relationships, publishing, and more.


Vanessa DiMauro (wikipedia LinkedIn)

Vanessa comes from the Enterprise 2.0 / academic & corporate space rather than the legal side.

She asked, what does social networking mean in the business context?

There have been many new tools emerge—it’s been the “Wild West.” We have had an opportunity to measure it effectively, and can start to move away from the tools towards the values that it can deliver.

There are different rules of engagement on social media sites.

Social and professional networks appear similar, but have very different purposes. With social networks you might want to share pictures or connect with former classmates. With professional networks the goals are to “evangelize your thought leadership” or perhaps make collective decisions. With both you want to make meaningful connections. With both you care about what kind of club you’re joining (remember the Marx brothers-- "I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member.").

Yet some of the same social rules we already live by apply equally in the online world. If we know someone personally we may be more comfortable reaching out to them. Space out interactions. Give three times per “ask.” Don’t wait to reach out to your LinkedIn connections until you need them.

Vanessa thinks there are opportunities to find the best of breed from other industries, that have already addressed social media. There is a road map and set of best practices around the most effective use of social media adaptable to the legal industry.

John Lipsey

He is developing “Connected” for Martindale Hubbell (I’m calling it MH Connected but that is not its brand name), a social networking site to be released later this quarter.

His core stakeholders are corporate counsel. How do we get beyond the “tip of the pyramid”? How can we tailor social media to their existing needs?

Key elements of social and professional networking include group and individual discussions (blogs and wikis) and relationship connection / identification. (I would add status updates).

What are the opportunities to provide more value to lawyers in social media? What do lawyers want? He thinks authentication and validation are really important. It may not matter so much that someone on Facebook is who they say they are. But it really does matter where attorney advice or referrals may be at stake.

For instance, you can’t be anonymous on MH Connected because that would destroy the trust model.

Every network in the world is looking for a critical mass. MH Connected is trying to identify relationships using their existing information such as working for same firm, being on a published opinion, or graduating law school together. MH Connected is trying to make it easier to get people together by suggesting people they may know (LinkedIn and Facebook already do this, through formal groups based on education or employment, and by allowing creation of groups by users interested in a particular topic or united in some other way).

Can social networking help in-house counsel manage “preferred provider” programs?

You can’t build this out for the early adopters. It has to help lawyers in everyday practice, including authentication, trust and so forth. What are the technologies that will engage your practitioners?

Conflict or attorney-client privilege risk can be addressed through thinking, what kind of group am I addressing? What is the audience?

John has a decent grasp of social networking principles, and some interesting ideas for what may connect lawyers in particular. It remains to be seen if the previously ossified Martindale Hubbell will truly be able to become a useful and valuable destination for lawyers.

Olivier Antoine

Social networking brings key information for inside and outside counsel. The new value being generated is the new type of information, such as who is connected to who, who has recently looked at your profile, and so forth.

Law firms are conservative environments and are very slow to adopt new ways of doing things, as is required to some extent for social networking.

Understanding who knows who can be important for the substance of the work he does (he defends companies accused of price-fixing, which entails understanding all of the information being shared between parties about prices).

Olivier recently noticed that a number of firm lawyers had linked to a lawyers at a firm being acquired just a few weeks before the deal was announced. Social networks make it easier to share information; the type of risk and precautionary steps are may be the same, but the magnitude of the risk greater.

Social media adoption is unavoidable. It has to be addressed.

Eugene Weitz

He compartmentalizes his business and personal connections. In either case, what is the value compared with the amount of time required?

Alcatel Lucent is a “global law division” of over 200 people, all over the world. As part of their knowledge management program, they are trying to figure out better ways to communicate.

In-house counsel have to stay current on the law and have to know the business. Martindale Hubbell and LinkedIn offer ways to communicate with the outside world. He’s also with a NJ counsel organization that is all about in-house lawyers talking to each other.

They choose to have discussions only with certain people. He doesn’t want a direct sales pitch from outside counsel, but he does want discussion and information sharing.

He works in the field of IT. He wants to know what the market is in outsourcing or other trends. If social media can help inside counsel understand law, benchmarking, and communicate, it will have a place.

Eugene expects that there will be substantive legal content on MH Connected in the same way that there is content on law firm web sites. The difference is that it will be collected and shared in one space.

I was surprised there was no mention of Legal OnRamp, which purports to provide similar functionality in terms of sharing online content. Doug Cornelius, who has previously posted twice on that platform, came through on Twitter however.

Live Discussion


John thinks that the value proposition might vary greatly between in-house and outside counsel. Eugene identified what in-house counsel want. Outside counsel want to attract people to them and build business through demonstrating expertise.

Bob said that beginners should look at LinkedIn simply as an online directory of professionals. You need to be in many different places to be visible as part of a high profile.

We’re getting to the point where the social media tools can be matched to the particular business or strategic goal.

Twitter Discussion

Mary Abraham has posted on how interesting the "back channel" of Twitter discussion became. At one point she relayed live a tweeted question from Doug (who was in Boston). I agree with her that it provided a whole new perspective, hitherto unavailable, of an audience's reaction to a session. It's a step up from blogging in terms of immediacy, but a step down in terms of thoughtful analysis.

You can see most of the posts on this session by searching Twitter for #LTNY and networking.

Obviously these are not my posts, but I thought it would provide readers some insight into the audience reaction to see some of the spicy comments on Twitter that arose during the session.

• GabeAcevedo #LTNY online networking panel. This is not what I expected. Must either leave/kill self soon as possible.
• nicolecaccamo: And that "safe" networking would exclude us non-lawyers presumably - missing out on a lot of value/connections #LTNY
• CherylMcKinnon: #ltny John Lipsey - authentication and validation needed for safe professional networking
• brucecarton: Uh oh, bloggers getting restless. RT @GabeAcevedo #LTNY networking panel. Martindale mentioned now 10 times in martindale sponsored panel.
• dougcornelius: @VMaryAbraham #LTNY Social networking is about community. You want to hang with your friends. Are your friends in that site? Connected?
• dougcornelius: @kdtalcott "Best Practices in Online Networking"? But Legal OnRamp is already doing what MH Connected wants to do #ltny
• CherylMcKinnon: #ltny John Lipsey - authentication and validation needed for safe professional networking [This post was "retweeted" or rebroadcast within a few seconds by two others]
• kevinokeefe: Session re online networking & social media has had 25% of audience leave. Turned exciting topic into something boring. #LTNY

Sharpening Sharepoint; Four Firms Implement SP Intranets

Title and Session Link: Sharpening SharePoint - Real Views from Peer Firms on Getting the Most Out of MOSS and SPS 2003

Description:

SharePoint is now widely used by law firms for numerous projects ranging from RM to DM and becoming the defacto standard for collaboration. What exactly does this tool provide and how can it be best utilized for your firm. Take this opportunity to learn what other firms are doing to sharpen their competitive edge using SharePoint.

Speaker(s):

Michael Williams - Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, L.L.P.
Sam Shipley - Ulmer & Berne LLP
Chad Ergun - White & Case LLP
Paul Phillips - Nixon Peabody LLP

This excellent session had top technologists at each of the firms frankly laying out the trials, tribulations, and successes of their implementations of Sharepoint for their portals and much more. What was especially interesting is that each of the speakers stressed in their implementation a different aspect of this powerful platform.

Mike Williams

Mike focused on Sharepoint's ability to pull in and flexibly display in one place information from a wide range of firm information sources, and to show information that took into account the person who had logged in. It also reflected very well an intranet design principle I've become familiar with; an intranet must account for both people who are members of a particular group or team, and want to use it in the course of their daily work, and those who are simply "visiting" the site and want to learn more about that team or group, or perhaps accomplish something quite specific.

The main "home page" he showed had three key tabs---My Links, My Matters, and My Worklist. Each tab would take up about two-thirds of the total width of the page. The matters tab automatically pulled in information from financial, billing, docketing, and document management systems. Other information on the page, such as some of the navigation and available applications, varied depending on the user's practice area and role.

Mike's firm's practice area pages have lots of links to external resources. Each practice area also has locked-down private area. Might have case result information or other information useful for marketing or internal organization.

Science Advisors (!) have their own portal page (I was amused as I set up a basic page for our science advisors just last week). It included information about what they do, experience, FAQs, “Ask the Scientists.” They also have an internal page, some project management.

Technical and Content Management Approach

They’ve assigned content managers to particular pages. They partnered with Handshake to integrate into their core systems, but also wrote some of it themselves. The IP group and insurance litigation groups have benefited more from the Sharepoint portal so far. He has a staff of two developers.

Paul Phillips

Nixon Peabody demonstrated an adoption of Sharepoint's MySite "social networking / personal portal" features that, next to Deloitte D-Street's approach, is perhaps the most involved and effective SP social networking of I've seen or heard of in a professional services firm.

They tried Plumtree portal but migrated to Sharepoint, moving in 2005. They are (mostly) in SP 2003. Settled on SPS ’03 medium farm and WSS 2 sites. New sites now use WSS 3, so they have wiki and blog capability. It sounds like growth of those tools has been fairly slow. New sites are created by KM team, which also is the team that handles staff and lawyer demands for new tools.

They’ve brought in third parties in specific areas. They’ve worked with Handshake, and have adopted Recommind. It is delivered only through SP.

They’ve adopted MySite, and push extensive numbers of web parts based on practice area and role. They also have a webpart gallery and allow simple user modification. They’ve removed some modification abilities. “It’s a combination of what we give them and what they can add to it.” Users click on a "change this site" button, and then have to make only one more click to add a web part to their MySite. They have a “top zone” MySite that the user can’t modify. That one includes billables, collections for partners. The gallery of iGoogle-like parts includes Mealey’s reports, “My Collaboration” sites, “NCAA Tourney Links”, “My docket”, and so forth. User MySite content is recorded in an NP specific data table.

Nixon Peabody has adopted a search strategy that indexes all the DM content (as many as 60 million documents?). Since 2005 they’ve had some growth in sites and upgrades.
They don’t use SP search. Recommind respects network security and DMS ethical walls. “Publication” of document in a KM system boosts its relevancy. Users can rate content on a 1-5 checks. KM documents gets a “Gold Star.” Some partners didn’t think that anybody should be rating documents.

They have a financial dashboard with network and internal security. Their dashboard updates at night, and at intervals throughout current day. A “Management Reports” site links to standard reporting. Users only get links to targeted reports. One set of data supports all outputs.

Dashboards shows last three years’ finances, by month. I was especially impressed by the attractive and easy-to-read billing information charts.

Things they did well:

• He challenged any requirement for customization.
• Gladly copied concepts successfully executed elsewhere.

If they did it over

Would have said no more often.

Might have asked less of some of their vendors. The vendor might have taken some of the requested options as an absolute “requirement,” i.e., the out-of-the box functionality might have worked well enough.

What is the adoption rate of personalization of MySite? They maintain metrics on who is adding what?

Sam Shipley

Sam's firm was not as far along in Sharepoint implementation, but had an excellent story about meeting the firm's most important needs (displaying accurate and up-to-the-hour financial information) and doing it well.

They wanted to replace the old intranet and daily newspaper.

They didn’t want a KM solution. They have an annual event where they invite vendors. They weren’t making a connection between the firm’s vision and strategy and their vendors.
The 2005 session led to a call to increase productivity, improve quality of service to clients, and manage growth.

They focused on productivity and the idea of a digital dashboard. It publishes firm performance indicators, at the firm, practice area, and attorney levels, with a “real time” mentality. Show them “how bad they really are.” If you show attorneys that they are at the bottom of a list, they’ll try to get off of it.

Sharepoint is really the delivery vehicle for the financial information.

When Marketing got involved in the design aspects of their intranet, it took some time to educate IT about what Marketing thought was important and educate Marketing about what IT could do.*

They finally decided to stop worrying about that and focused on financial reporting first.

They had a simple dashboard showing YTD, goal for year, amount of last year’s billings. They exposed comparative numbers for practice groups. The practice group leaders could drill into attorney records of billable hours and rates.

Each attorney also could see their targets and actual billables. They built a data warehouse separate from ancient accounting system that had real-time results. Let attorneys affect their ranking in real-time by entering time.

Administrative departments are starting to have their own pages. Goofy content drives people to the site.

What they did well.

• Tied work to management objectives.
• “Just did it.”
• Added goofy/entertaining content (take advantage of someone with a good sense of humor)
• Piloted in one practice group where the practice area leader was really pushing performance.

What they missed

• They haven't gotten major announcements moved out of email.
• Listen to what they want—birthdays! Needed to add it directly to front page. It drives people to the content.

Frustrations

• MySite has some things that aren’t valuable. They use SP “audiences” to target messages. But nobody in the firm understands it.
• He is working on security.
• Wishes firm had a communications plan. Need a standard way to communicate a given type of message. Email is the default.

Chad Ergun—“Attorney360”

Although Chad was technically the moderator he couldn't resist a few slides and a few minutes about his firm's sophisticated information display system.

For the "Attorney360" project White & Case built a “data mart” based on Handshake that is updated every 45 minutes. Billings, time entries, matter profile and description information gets pushed to internal RSS feeds. Chad later told me that they are using a combination of the built-in Sharepoint web part reader and some custom-designed RSS feed readers. They built an individual expertise system that assesses your time entry. The intranet shows “top matters.” Their intranet also shows current (online) status of attorneys on a particular matter.

The theory here is that by leveraging the login, you can display information that the attorney is likely to need, at or near the time it is needed. A "push" model instead of a "pull" or "go find it" model.

They did a survey of attorneys and assessed what they do when they aren’t billing. They learned a lot about what is difficult to do and what wastes attorney time.

*Note revised per comment from Sam.

ILTA talk on Social Networking -- Boon or Boondoggle; Tuesday afternoon

Title and Session Link: Social Networking - Marketing Boon, Malpractice Nightmare or Simple Boondoggle?

Description:

The recruiting manager has created a firm FaceBook site. The marketing director is encouraging all the lawyers to join LinkedIn. The firm's general counsel is freaking out over the possible ethic violations and malpractice possibilities. The older lawyers simply aren't sure what to do. The younger lawyers are wondering what all the hoopla is about. We explore social and business networking, the potential problems and rewards and what you can do about it.


Speaker:


Jeffrey Brandt -(yes he's on LinkedIn), brande new CIO / CKO of Crowell & Moring LLP

The real theme of Jeff's talk was not that social networks are a boondoggle but that they are here to stay and that attorneys and law firms had better get used to it and adapt. While Jeff had some good information about some of the possible pitfalls of social networks for lawyers and law firms, and some good statistics about adoption of social networking, he never really answered the question, "Why do people do business social networking?" (The answer I think is that they provide a varied and complex way to share information about one's life, in a way that lets you keep connected with people and learn what "light connections" you might have with people you are already working with).

Despite that shortcoming, I very much appreciated Jeff's openness to comments and contributions from the audience, in the spirit of Web 2.0. Some of the content identified below was in fact contributed by various audience members. I'm sorry I can't give audience members specific credit as I don't know their names.

His favorite definition of a social network tool was that it is simply a "phone book or directory."

Jeff tells a story of encouraging attorneys to join LinkedIn, then have the risk management people at a firm he worked at flip out. ILTA has a LinkedIn group, Jeff runs it. He has 918 connections, over 7,000,000 people "three degrees of separation" away from his connections. He only has 18 Friends in Facebook. "So I'm a geeky person with very few friends."


Only 5-6 people in the room were not in LinkedIn.

Jeff identified the leading social networks as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Second Life, MySpace, plaxo, jigsaw, Flickr, and YouTube.

Social Networking is Not Just for Kids

Facebook has 110,000,000+ users. It is the 4th most trafficked web site in the world. Several US law firms have facebook pages, but many employers block access to Facebook.

499 of Fortune 500 companies have director-level profiles and higher on LinkedIn.

Second Life and LinkedIn are Not Fads


SecondLife is a virtual world. You can drive cars, live in a house, buy things, and so forth. Sun Microsystems has world-wide meetings in SecondLife. The rule is, your "avatar" has to resemble a human being at the meeting. Intel held a seminar on software development on Second Life.


KMLegal magazine had an article about attorneys (solo practitioners) setting up virtual offices in SecondLife.

Policies

Less than 10% of firms have formal policy on employee participation in social networks. One audience member indicated the basic policy was to allow participation, but restrict it to personal use (no reference to clients). Another said no chat rooms.

A woman mentioned that her firm had tried to shut down access to social networking sites, but they found out that some attorneys were using the systems to get information about their clients on SecondLife and LinkedIn.

Attorney Profiles in Social Networking Sites

Reed Smith has 498 profiles; Jones Day & MoFo each have 520; Crowell & Moring has 249 profiles.

A person from Baker & McKenzie in the audience said that they had 780 in Facebook last year, and by this year it had doubled to 1580.

Legal OnRamp

This directory structured exclusively for attorneys includes an e-commerce component and a large amount of substantive legal content.

Marketing Benefits of LinkedIn and Social Networks

• Raise the personal profile of the lawyer.
• Raise the firm profile through raising the profile of its lawyers.
• Identify additional "who knows who."
• Good information update tool.
  

Martindale Hubble and Interaction are both hooking into LinkedIn.
Jeff did not get his current job through LinkedIn. But he has heard of changes to vendor representatives before the vendor CEO did, and has heard of people getting jobs through LinkedIn.

Jeff feels that involvement in social networking sites by firms qua firms may be driven by their recruiting needs.

Malpractice

Jeff half-jokingly claimed that the level of perceived risk can be seen by the length of the law firm's disclaimer. Some firms have very long disclaimers.

Client Relationship Creation

Can you inadvertently create a client relationship by linking or answering a question? I think that answering a question posed on LinkedIn in a way that addresses the particular factual situation of the questioner might well (and maybe even should) create an attorney-client relationship. One of the problematic features of LinkedIn and other social networking sites is that they are internet-based, and content never ages out or goes away on the internet.