Social media
Social media policies for the workplace
In my last article I wrote about the risks employers face from the use by employees of social media and recommended that businesses have a social media policy. Why is a policy necessary? Employers need to manage their employees fairly and consistently and this applies to how they respond to their employees’ usage of social […]
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Risks of social media use in the workplace
Employment lawyers seem to spend a good deal of time warning of the risks posed by Facebook, Twitter and other social media perhaps without emphasising enough the opportunities presented by proper use of these immensely powerful tools. Companies large and small are adopting social media in increasingly large numbers. In research published by media agency […]
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Social networking – do you get it?
2010 was definitely the year of the social network. Big user numbers. Huge valuations. Excessive media coverage. The majority of us now know what social networking means: it means Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Let’s see who’s using them and why. Facebook is where Generation Y hangs out big time. In that age bracket you really […]
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Discussion groups online – where is everyone?
I like the LinkedIn group for the Law Society Gazette. It’s a forum for lively debate between solicitors of every background and point of view, about any legal practice-related issues they feel like airing. It attracts, mostly, genuinely interesting and useful contributions. There’s never been anything quite like it (the letters page of the Gazette […]
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Twitter for law firms
It’s easy to use Twitter poorly, something millions of users demonstrate every day by updating their followers about what they’re doing, thinking or feeling at any given moment. There are extremely few people whose opinions and emotions are so compelling and central to the public good that we should hang on every character (up to […]
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LinkedIn for law firms
Speaking generally, I’m much less bullish on what LinkedIn can do for law firms than what either Facebook or Twitter can offer. I’ve come to view those as dynamic platforms that offer interesting and even exciting possibilities for law firms to tell their stories and shape their online personas. LinkedIn, by contrast, is more a […]
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Facebook for law firms
Should law firms develop a presence on the social networks? A small minority of individual lawyers actively network on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and perhaps also on Facebook, though the majority are infrequent users of these services. Now law firms themselves are taking tentative steps to establish an official presence. In the first of a series […]
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Social media in Scotland – a lawyer’s view
Web 2.0 has come and ”¦ well that is generally about it. Within a fairly staid and traditional Scottish legal fraternity, to date fragmented and inconsistent use has been made of the tools of Web 2.0. A number of smaller firms have started to make use of the internet as a means of communicating with […]
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Social software at Addleshaw Goddard
Blog beginnings Addleshaw Goddard started using social software over three years ago by using WordPress to run two blogs for a couple of our business services teams. The IT team replaced a traditional weekly email newsletter with a blog. This covered reports on the various activities they were engaged in, together with more informal posts […]
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Using Web 2.0 within the organisation
Expensive centralised, standalone systems and complex processes of communicating and storing information are amongst some of the main contributors to wasteful and inefficient processes. People need to work on a platform that gets them out of their in-boxes and word documents. New tools like wikis, blogs, RSS and personal dashboards are combined in this platform […]
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Social networks – how they work
Facebook has over 200 million users; LinkedIn, the network for business and professionals, has over 40 million; Twitter is all the rage; and don’t forget blogs. Although these services are hugely popular, it’s safe to say that amongst lawyers use is still largely confined to so-called early adopters. Should you be using these (public) social […]
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Beyond collaboration
In his groundbreaking book The End of Lawyers?, law professor and futurist Richard Susskind discusses ten types of “disruptive legal technologies” that will shred the existing business models of most law practices. One of those forces is “closed client communities” that draw upon their members’ collective wisdom in legal matters to produce a knowledge database […]
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