Legal Marketing & PR

45% of Law Firms Block Access to Social Networking Sites

By Larry Bodine, Esq.

According to Doug Cornelius, who writes the Compliance Building blog, nearly half of all law firms block access from work computers to Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. These are three of the top 10 most visited sites on the web.

He and Steve Matthews conducted an informal survey of 231 law firms, large and small, in January 2009 on Zoomerang.com.  Here's the key question:

Does your firm block access to any of these sites?
Facebook 85%
MySpace 77%
Twitter 26%
LinkedIn 14%
YouTube 55%
Blogs 22%

A number of law firms block access to social networking sites because they believe it translates to social "not-working" in the office, according to Cornelius. Yet one has to wonder how valid that concern is—especially when weighed against the advantages that these sites can bring.

The main reasons for blocking, they reported, were concerns about the following:

• Loss of productivity
• Viruses
• Confidentiality
• Bandwidth consumption

In an article in Law Practice Magazine, Matthews showed that all four concerns were bogus.

Cornelius added: "I fear that many firms use blockage as their policy. That may have worked 10 years ago, but not today. You can just as easily access these sites from iPhone or blackberry as you can from a firm computer. Blocking does not stop the bad behavior that it is trying to prevent. Blocking merely changes the access method.

There is a fair amount of research, the most prominent of which are two reports from McKinsey, showing that access to social networks at work, coupled with a good policy results in a more engaged, more motivated and potentially more innovative workplace. You should set sensible policies and set reasonable expectations for your employees. Social networking sites at their core are communications platform. You should be able to adapt your policies on email, confidentiality, marketing and similar policies to easily include social networking sites. If not, those other policies probably need updating anyhow."

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on March 17, 2009 (boomark / email).