International Law

"What fresh hell is this?" Exploring Twitter for lawyers

By Doug Jasinski

I think we can all agree that most lawyers already feel the perpetual crunch of excessive demands on their time. Between practice management, administration, professional development, firm and practice group meetings, and traditional business development activities like speaking engagements and industry association participation, one must also squeeze full helpings of billable work and family time which doesn't leave a lot of space in the margins for exploring new technologies. But stay current one must. To that end, I have noted over the last month or two that my own personal network of legal technology gurus/early adopters (a list that includes Steve Matthews, Kevin O'Keefe, and David Bilinsky amongst others) have all taken to a "micro-blogging" tool called Twitter.

Twitter fits somewhere in between text messaging and blogging. Twitter asks you to continually answer the simple question "what are you doing?" and limits you to a 140 character response. My first reaction was "I don't get it". My second reaction was "why on earth would I want to know what a whole bunch of other people are doing every minute of the day and how badly do I (or my lawyer clients) need another boatload of digital errata in their lives? Steve Matthews has tackled these questions head on in this blog post. I'll be honest: I still don't get it - yet. But I've decided to give it a go in any event because I'm confident that my early adopter crew isn't all playing in this sandbox by accident. I'll keep you updated on my progress and my thoughts on how Twitter may or may not be relevant as I go. Stay tuned.

Full post as published by Legal Marketing Canada on September 16, 2008 (boomark / email).