Legal Research

LinkedIn Becoming More Powerful for Legal Industry Use

By Connie Crosby

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?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 12, 2009 (boomark / email).