LinkedIn Becoming More Powerful for Legal Industry Use
The professional social networking site LinkedIn has slowly been making a number of changes that are making the site increasingly useful. I am still finding my way around, but changes I find of interest:
- the addition of third party applications that allow me to do things like share my presentation slides (via Slideshare) and to see recently added presentations of others, and to see what my contacts are reading with the Amazon.com application;
- increased and improved functionality of groups, allowing those in a group to have a discussion;
- suggestions of people who I might know who are on LinkedIn but with whom I am not yet connected.
To help us find our way around and use LinkedIn for the legal industry, enter The LinkedIn Lawyer blog by David Barrett, partner and litigation attorney at Hulien & Barrett in Boston. While he doesn’t limit his discussion just to LinkedIn–there’s lots of Twitter and Slideshare content, too–his exploration of LinkedIn is what really makes him stand out. I don’t know of anyone else really doing this (please do let me know if there are others!). It makes sense to talk about the use of LinkedIn by lawyers since, as Steve Matthews pointed out in June 2008 there were at least 216,000 lawyers on the social networking site, and it is likely that number has grown significantly.
Some good recent blog posts from Barrett:
- Law.com Shares Tips to Build Your LinkedIn Profile (Nov. 8/08)
- Is LinkedIn a Better Lawyer Search Than Google? (Nov. 16/08)
- Use LinkedIn Answers to Interact with Potential Clients and In-house Counsel (Dec. 1/08)
- How I Connected With Barack Obama on LinkedIn (Jan. 5/09)
If you are already on LinkedIn, here are some groups to consider joining:
- Law and Legal Open Networkers group started by Barrett
- Knowledge Management for Legal Professionals
- Law Firm Intranets
- Law Librarians
- Law-Lib
- Legal Blogging
- Legal Technology Professionals
- and 82 other groups with “Lawyer” in the name
What new LinkedIn applications or groups you would recommend?
In addition to using SlideShare for presentations I’ve done, I use the Amazon application for recent book publications.
I also use the blog applications, and I’m slowly noticing some more traffic through LinkedIn.
I haven’t had much use yet for Company Buzz (would law firms even be on there?) or My Travel.
I haven’t had a look at those others yet–thank you for mentioning them, Omar.
Thanks! Posted to our Facebook page: http://tinyurl.com/CLASFacebook
Tom Winter
Community Legal Aid Services
I’m glad you found it helpful, Tom!
More on LinkedIn for lawyers:
– 59% of Lawyers Have Joined Online Social Networks – http://tinyurl.com/a8gjpq
– Top 10 mistakes People Make on LinkedIn – http://www.lawmarketing.com/pages/articles.asp?Action=Article&ArticleID=836
– How to Make the Most of LinkedIn – http://www.lawmarketing.com/pages/articles.asp?Action=Article&ArticleID=683
Larry Bodine, Esq.
Apollo Business Development
4601 E. Camino Pimeria Alta
Tucson, AZ 85718
630.942.0977
Lbodine@LawMarketing.com
http://www.LarryBodine.com
http://twitter.com/LarryBodine
Thanks for the additional links, Larry. I’d also love to see your thoughts on all the new features.
Cheers,
Connie
I’m also seeing a number of groups for government types, even more specifically, groups within the OPS (Ontario Public Service)!
I wonder if this is a signal of the future state – as some platforms adopt popular features of others, are we going to have a streamlining/convergence? I hope so – there are too many places to watch if you want to keep up!
As we saw with the Knowledge Management for Legal Professionals group, the challenge is knowing where to give a group or burgeoning community a home in the first place. Do you go everywhere that people might be? Or do you pick the “best” site and stick with that? Or build your own?
I am also finding a lot of people building similar groups on LinkedIn, with pretty much the same people signing up, so that it feels like the same group over and over.
In some ways it feels like we have been social networking for a long time, but in others it feels like we are all just such newbies!
I use my linkedin profile to connect my various clients from around the country. I also use slideshare plugin to allow clients to download educational presentations and box.net to download my ebooks on law practice.