Phil

I don't think there are any rules at all, apart from ensuring you observe professional ethics.

I have had around a dozen people in the UK ask for legal advice – and am very happy to help pro – bono at any stage. I've acted for a number of folks through the years I've made contacts over the net.

Quite honestly, most of us do the job as we love the contact with people. Set yourself up as a slick advertising ambulance chaser and you won't get any interaction at all.

The golden rule? Be yourself.

The Canadians are laying down the law on Twitter!

DON'T post anything you would be embarrassed to have your mother read.

The one big "Do" I'd add is to check out http://www.TwitterKarma.com, which helps you remove those who don't follow you back, which is essential if you want to build a large network (Twitter does not allow you to follow more than 2000 unless you have at least 1800 following you back — from then on it's the 10% rule).

I would also suggest any lawyers who use twitter and also use LinkedIn to check out the Legal Tweeters group at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1803189.

Thanks for the article.

Andy Mayoras
http:twitter.com/probateblogger

Feel free to do a comparison at vs.

Thanks Steve – great post.

- Searched on twellow.com for attorneys in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, who are on twitter so I can learn more about the legal profession and develop relationships with lawyers in that city;

- Started following legal and marketing experts in areas that I am interested in so I get up-to-date information about my field, and issues that I might be interested in;

- Tweeted live from conferences that I think my followers would be interested in attending/hearing about. I think this is critical. Your tweets build your brand, but they should also add value to the people who follow you.

See for yourself – follow me @Leoramaccabee

I think the "don't" you quote is best interpreted as something akin to what your mama probably taught you: "don't say anything to anyone in private that you wouldn't want repeated in public." In other words, a guideline – not a promise. Tweets don't typically find themselves front page above the fold, but they are public, and the possibility is there for embarrassment if you don't keep that firmly in mind.

@MK: I think it's best to think of Twitter not so much as an "ad campaign" (which would be … um, not so well received on Twitter to begin with), something with a measurable ROI that you can split test and implement over and over. Rather, it's just one tool in creating your online brand and presence.

Will a lawyer lose potential clients if she's not on Twitter? Probably not. But being on Twitter gives the lawyer an unparalleled opportunity to create relationships that can serve as the basis for future referrals, to monitor her online reputation and perhaps improve it, if it needs some tweaking, and to share and receive helpful resources.

Is it time-consumptive? Not so much, really. I recommend a one-month tryout, where you spend no more than 5-10 minutes on average each day, gradually increasing your participation. I'm writing more about this right now, actually, for a post on The Inspired Solo.

In response to Tim B, a lot of the lawyers I follow tweet about their blog entries, random daily observations (sports teams they follow, cute things their kids say,), requests for input (@taxgirl often polls her readers and includes their input in her blog entries), and very often post news articles from the various online news outlets, as well as law articles from sites like the WSJ law blog, Above the Law, Law.com, and so on. Sometimes the articles pertain to their fields of practice, and sometimes not. A lot of the time, people respond with comments about the articles, and then the original tweeter will respond to those comments and so on.

Hope that helps illuminate a little how it's easy to hit that 10 tweets/day mark! :)

"Don’t tweet more than 10 times a day or more than five times an hour. (There are different schools of thought on this one – for instance, Jim Calloway advises that four times a day is appropriate.) This might seem low compared to others you follow, but in the end, you don’t look like a busy professional if you’re tweeting all day."

"Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t want to be quoted on in the news. …"

Presuming that we're talking about professional tweeting here, I think maybe these two suggestions set up an impossible conflict. In most cases, lawyers should not want anything they do to be reported in the news. Also, in most cases, the news wouldn't want to report what those lawyers are doing, because it's not newsworthy, in much the same way that most tweets are not really newsworthy (i.e. "I had breakfast. Yum!").

If I had to tweet four times during my workday, the tweets would almost read "Working" because, well, what else could I report? That's what I'm doing, and my work invariably involves the stuff that lawyers do — almost all of which is specific to my particular clients and their legal matters, and so the details are not appropriate for release on any pretext. Even if it were deemed appropriate to tweet, it would be unbelievably mundane.