Arbitration & Mediation

Your Experiences / Thoughts on Martindale Hubbell's Connected Site?

By Christopher B. Hopkins, Esq.

I posted earlier today about the Council on Litigation Management Conference. They are apparently partnering with Martindale Hubbell, which has put its "Connected" professional networking site into public beta. Connected can be found here.

Obviously, Connected is intended to be the lawyer's version of LinkedIn. Without question, since there are competing social networking sites, we can certainly expect other law-related vendors to get into the professional networking action (West? Lexis-Mealey's). Although it is hard to imagine a Facebook vs. Myspace distinction for professional networking sites.

I am awaiting confirmation to sign onto Connected. First, the site doesn't like Google Chrome. So you want to use Internet Explorer. It's hard to get lawyers to be truly high tech, isn't it?

Second, for some reason it could not match my law firm's name with its domain name -- apparently checking your age, year of admission to practice, and work email domain are their initial parameters to confirm your identity when you sign up. This may be unique to me since my online Martindale listing, for some reason, presently omits my firm name. So perhaps your experience will be easier.

Once we get that worked out, I'll do another post. Email me if you've signed up and let me know your thoughts (email link is upper right corner of this site).

Also, are you on Twitter (cbhopkins), Facebook (cbhopkins), and LinkedIn? After you clear voicemails, emails, faxes, and mail... do we need other ways to be reached? Or are the latter groups just there when you have a spare moment at the courthouse, airport or depo?

Whenever you take that next foray into social/professional networking, feel free to drop a line and follow/friend/connect with me.

Full post as published by Florida Arbitration Law on March 12, 2009 (boomark / email).