Back in the early days of the internet, much of the debate within law firms was around whether they should have a website and, if so, then who was going to look at it. Was it even appropriate for lawyers to have a website, was it demeaning for professionals to use these types of technologies and should there be biographies and direct contact details for partners? Today those arguments are viewed as irrelevant.
It is the development of social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, the ability to post video clips on YouTube and the ability for people to create new personas for themselves in new virtual reality worlds such as Second Life that are now triggering debates within law firms. While the website debates of the past were mainly about how firms used the internet, these new debates are around how individuals, whether they are partners or employees, use the internet. Social networking sites make it very easy for people to reveal a lot of information about themselves should they so wish.
As these new technologies are really driven by individuals rather than organisations, they can be very spontaneous. A search on Facebook of Clifford Chance, for example, reveals that groups have been set up by summer scheme students, trainees in London, alumni in Hong Kong and students taking the LPC at the College of Law. It is impossible to know whether these are groups that have been sanctioned by Clifford Chance or whether they have come into being of their own accord. Some use the Clifford Chance logo, but that doesn’t mean anything of itself since anyone can copy the logo and put it up in a Facebook group.
How are firms reacting to this? At the beginning of January, DLA Piper created what it called a privately-accessed equivalent of Facebook called “Inside the Tent”. This is intended to enable DLA Piper’s graduate recruitment team to communicate easily with their future trainees. There will be a range of information available including news about the firm, forthcoming firm events and social activities. That does not, however, replace what trainees are already doing – they have a Facebook group called DLA Piper Trainees 2009 with 40 members and featuring a news story from another Facebook group which has a photo of DLA’s global head of Islamic finance Oliver Agha with a fried egg on his face.
Facebook has functionality which enables members of groups to easily organise meeting times and dates for events. One law firm has started to use this to help organise attendance at their recruitment events at universities.
YouTube can be used both as a medium for personal expression and also as a way for institutions to make more readily available a lot of knowledge. In many ways it does for video what the broader Internet did for print and visuals. A search on YouTube for Linklaters finds that someone – for reasons best known for themselves – has posted up some footage looking at the outside of Linklaters’ offices in New York. And a little bit more digging discovers that as well as a video tribute to Tony Angel produced by the Managing Partner Forum featuring the great and the good of the legal profession, the “out-takes” version is also available to view. Someone has also created a home-made advertisement lasting nearly six minutes celebrating the opening of DLA Piper in Warsaw.
In a very different video clip, Latham & Watkins partner Scott Ballenger makes the case for providing expanded access to experimental drugs for the terminally ill as part of a lecture given for the Washington DC based public policy group the Cato Institute.
This breadth of material reflects how YouTube is being used as a means of personal expression and also as a means of corporate communications and the challenge for law firms – like other businesses – is to decide how it will engage. Trying to decide whether to engage is arguably pointless since there is a reasonable chance that either your own people or some third party will involve you anyway.
Firms are also looking to engage with new online worlds such as Second Life, an internet based 3D virtual world. Second Life users, called “residents”, are able to interact with each other through 3D representations of themselves, creating an advanced level of social networking. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialise, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items and services with one another. Second Life claims 12 million residents from around the world, around 1.5 million of whom have been active in the last two months
One of the characteristics of Second Life is that residents own the IP rights to any objects they might create and they are able to sell those objects to other residents using the Second Life currency, the Linden Dollar. This has a floating exchange rate with the US Dollar and trades at around LD$265 to US$1.
Field Fisher Waterhouse opened a virtual office in Second Life in 2007 as a way of engaging with its technology clients and has gone on to host an art exhibition in both the real world and Second Life.
Lovells launched a temporary exhibition in Second Life to mark the 10th anniversary of its pro bono unit and Pro Bono Week in November 2007. The exhibition showcased current and former pro bono clients including Whitechapel Mission, Thames 21, Poetry in Wood, Community Links, National Centre for Domestic Violence, Greenworks, Muslim Youth.Net, The Prince’s Trust, and Action for Blind People. We also posted a video guided tour onto YouTube for those who were unable to access Second Life.
Clients, employees and potential recruits all use these technologies in many different ways and the challenge for law firms is to use them in a way that matches the wider trends in society as a whole.
Chris Hinze is head of corporate communications at Lovells LLP. He writes here in a personal capacity.
Email chris.hinze@lovells.com.
