Social Networking May Pay Off in the End

At a recent panel about social networking for lawyers, one participant told of his success with the professional networking site LinkedIn.

Within a few weeks of joining, he had made several fruitful connections, including one with a former classmate who is now the general counsel at a company his firm had courted. Thanks to LinkedIn, the courtship became a long-term relationship.

Stories of instant success are rare among lawyers using social networking sites. But instant success is rare for any form of marketing.

Of greater interest is the longer-term, cumulative value of these sites. With their enrollments growing by leaps and bounds, you should be a prominent member of the club.

Glorified Directories

For all their hype, social-networking Web sites are just glorified directories ' the 21st-Century version of the phone book or the legal directory.

But unlike their forebearers, these directories give you far more control, helping you tailor your listing and manage your network in ways no traditional directory ever could.

Some people question the value of professional networking sites, given that a critical mass has yet to join them. But to my mind, avoiding social networking until it becomes widespread makes no more sense than waiting to launch a blog until everyone else has one. Would you rather lead the pack or trail behind it?

This column provides an introduction to some of the leading social networking sites. First, I discuss three general interest sites ' ones open to all comers. Next, I review sites that focus membership on legal professionals.

Linking In

While all of these sites are for networking, some cater to professional networking and others to social networking. Among the former, the leading site is LinkedIn. It claims an international membership of more than 20 million professionals from some 50,000 companies. With his 1990 play and later movie, “Six Degrees of Separation,” John Guare popularized the idea that we are all connected through the networks of people we know. LinkedIn is built on that concept, although it reduces the degrees of separation to three.

When you create a profile on LinkedIn, it becomes the hub of your network, allowing you to connect with other professionals and them with you. Your network consists of the people you connect with directly, their connections and their connections' connections, so that you are always within three degrees of connecting with anyone else.

Within your network and your extended network, you can mine for potential clients, service providers, subject experts and other contacts.

You can also search for business opportunities and for jobs or job candidates. You can directly communicate with your first-degree contacts and, through them, request introductions to others.

What you get out of LinkedIn will turn on what you put into it. As soon as you sign up, add as many contacts as possible and continue to add more from then on. In addition, enhance your profile in other ways, such as by joining groups, endorsing other members and posting or answering questions within your network.

LinkedIn costs nothing to join. Paid accounts offer extra features and options, but are not necessary to benefit from the site's basic networking tools.

Finding Friends On Facebook

In contrast to the professional are sites where the emphasis is on social interaction.

The first of these was Friendster, launched in 2002, followed soon after by MySpace. But the one attracting the most buzz generally and among legal professionals is Facebook.

Launched as a virtual hangout for college kids, Facebook is on track to have the largest and most diverse membership of any such site by year's-end.

As a social networking tool, Facebook is powerful. You can build networks around locations, interests, schools, companies or whatever. You can chat, share photos and videos, post bulletin-board style messages, play games, coordinate calendars and even advertise.

But for professional networking, Facebook falls short. One reason for this is that, unlike other sites, it hides your full profile from anyone you have not designated a “friend.”

Since joining, I have connected with a number of friends, but they are all friends I already knew ' all connections I already had through LinkedIn.

Facebook is adding features to make itself friendlier for businesses. For example, businesses can now sponsor custom pages that focus on their products or services. But its strength is in maintaining existing connections, not building new ones.

Feeling the Plaxo Pulse

A hybrid between professional and social networking is Plaxo.

At its core, it is a contacts manager. But over the past year, it has reinvented itself. Once primarily used for updating Microsoft's Outlook software, it is now a multifaceted tool for managing, tracking and networking with contacts across multiple platforms.

Where LinkedIn's emphasis is on expanding your network, Plaxo's is on strengthening it. It does this through two primary methods: synchronization and sharing.

Its cross-platform sync feature lets you tie together all your address books. Plaxo synchronizes with Outlook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Mac OS X, Hotmail and LinkedIn, as well as with mobile devices. It does the same with most calendar applications. Sharing is where Plaxo shows its social networking side. With your address book as the launching point, you can connect with the people you know who are also using Plaxo.

Once connected, any changes your contacts make to their contact information is updated in your Plaxo address book and synchronized with your Outlook and other address books.

In addition, through a feature called Plaxo Pulse, the system keeps you up-to-date with your contacts' other activities.

As your contacts update their status on Twitter, post items to their blogs, or add photos to Flickr, their updates appear on your Pulse stream.

You can also create a public profile for yourself and merge into it any of your own external feeds as a single stream. That way, someone viewing your profile will see the universe of your current activity online.

Of the three, LinkedIn is the stronger marketing tool. Facebook is a fun way to keep in contact with your circle of friends and colleagues. Plaxo is a sure route to maintaining your contacts over the long haul.

For Lawyers Only?

The problem with networking sites that limit membership to lawyers is that attorneys are their only members. Compared with open sites, restricted venues sometimes seem like the proverbial parties where no one shows up.

As I looked at lawyers-only sites, I was struck by how little networking they generate. Whether online or off, networking anticipates a community, defined by mutual interests. Call it symbiosis, call it the profit motive, but networking carries the expectation of mutual benefit. When a networking site is open broadly, that benefit may be far too attenuated to justify the effort.

That is not to condemn all lawyer-networking sites, particularly not those built around this theme of mutual benefit. That benefit is readily apparent in a site whose members are divided between general counsel looking to hire outside firms and outside lawyers looking their flirtatious best.

Ramping Up

Such is the idea behind Legal OnRamp. Members are in-house lawyers at large companies, and outside lawyers, mostly at larger firms. The latter get multiple opportunities to strut their stuff and, with any luck, establish or strengthen relationships with those on the inside.

Of the sites I reviewed, this one seemed to offer the most promise for productive networking. With its threefold focus on connections, community and content, it is a next-generation iteration of a site that's been defunct for a decade, ALM's Counsel Connect, arguably the first networking site for lawyers. The similarity may not be accidental, given that Legal OnRamp's advisory board includes David Johnson, a former Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering partner who was Counsel Connect's chair. But Legal OnRamp's more direct lineage is to the general counsel of nine blue chip companies, led by Cisco System's general counsel, Mark Chandler.

They sought a tool to automate collaboration and content sharing between in-house and outside counsel. It had to allow sharing among broad communities of lawyers while also maintaining secure areas for privacy.

The result is a multipurpose platform that cherry picks the best parts from multiple platforms: extranets, Facebook, news aggregators, research libraries, document-management systems and the proverbial water cooler. CEO Paul Lippe, himself a former GC, calls it a dynamic social system.

It is also a selective, invitation-only system. Only about half of private firm lawyers who request entr'e are allowed in, and then only if they agree to pony up not cash, but substantive articles or FAQs to be shared with other members.

Once inside, Legal OnRamp looks like other networking sites, revolving around connections among users. Unlike other sites, it puts as much emphasis on content as on connections. Up-front are various news and blog feeds. Deeper in are libraries of FAQs, law firm bulletins, research materials and legal forms.

Within this networking superstructure, users can create private areas, called “ramps” ' most created by companies. These closed-access ramps have their own, secure layers of networking tools, content libraries and collaboration tools. Cisco's, for example, includes a database of its contracts and another of its patents.

The beauty pageant aspect is a strong allure for private firm lawyers. By posting content, contributing FAQs, and participating in discussion groups, they can show their stuff in front of an elite group of potential clientele. There is even a marketplace where GCs can post RFPs.

“We're starting at the high end,” says Lippe. “It's easy to move from elite to non-elite. It's not so easy to move from non-elite to elite.”

Legal OnRamp may soon have some weighty competition. Later this year, Martindale-Hubbell will roll out its networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Like Legal OnRamp, a key focus will be on networking and knowledge sharing between in-house and outside counsel. For now, the service is in early beta testing.

On Life Support

While the symbiosis between in-house and outside counsel fuels Legal OnRamp, the absence of immediate benefit may explain why sites that lack focus falter. Consider LawLink.

A key measure of a networking site is its vitality, and this one was nearly comatose. LawLink's structure parallels that of LinkedIn: Users build networks of “trusted colleagues,” with networks extending through three degrees of relationships.

The concept works well on LinkedIn, but not at all here.

Searching for lawyers from my home state of Massachusetts, I found 107. Of those, fewer than a quarter had made even a single connection.

These are some of the same people who are on LinkedIn and have hundreds of connections there.

LawLink hosts discussion forums around various topics, but these, too, are largely dormant. An “open forum” had a total of three posts, the most recent from November 2007.

Without more reason for members to engage with one another, LawLink holds little promise, but at least it still has a heartbeat.

A similar site, Lawyer-Link, appears to be dead. The site's front page remains, but attempts to register failed, as did attempts to contact site administrators.

Communities of Interest

If the success of a networking site is tied to its support for a community of interest, then a promising launch is Pivotal-Discovery.com. Still in
beta, its target is a subset of the legal community: e-discovery and litigation professionals.

Key features include individual profiles and connections among members, group connections, forums organized by case phase, individual blogs, instructional and promotional videos uploaded by members, an industry events calendar, industry news headlines and job postings.

Another promising area is sites designed for lawyers within a single state. The Minnesota State Bar Association, for example, is piloting MyPractice. It is built using Ning, the make-it-yourself network platform backed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.

For networking with an international flavor, sample Lawyrs.net. Launched in September 2007 by a German company, it has members from more than 100 countries, ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam.

One unique feature is a directory of law firms. Each firm's listing includes practice areas and international offices, along with news and updates about the firm. Click on a particular office location and get contact information and maps specific to that office.

If retro is your thing, ESQChat.com may be your site. It describes itself as a private meeting place for attorneys to ask questions, learn more about the law and make new acquaintances.

It takes a giant step backwards to an age of chat rooms and message forums. Legal message boards rarely take off ' and these prove the point.

The bulk of the forums devoted to legal topics had no posts.

The chat rooms, likewise, were empty. So much for networking.

A Legal Social-Networking Directory

A list of the Web sites mentioned in this article.

ESQChat.com: www.esqchat.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com

LawLink: www.lawlink.com

Lawyer Link: www.lawyer-link.com

Lawyrs.net: www.lawyrs.net

Legal OnRamp: www.legalonramp.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com

MyPractice: www.mypracticelaw.org

MySpace: www.myspace.com

Ning: www.ning.com

Pivotal-Discovery.com: www.pivotaldiscovery.com

Plaxo: www.plaxo.com

Plaxo Pulse: www.plaxo.com/tour

Twitter: http://twitter.com

At a recent panel about social networking for lawyers, one participant told of his success with the professional networking site LinkedIn.

Within a few weeks of joining, he had made several fruitful connections, including one with a former classmate who is now the general counsel at a company his firm had courted. Thanks to LinkedIn, the courtship became a long-term relationship.

Stories of instant success are rare among lawyers using social networking sites. But instant success is rare for any form of marketing.

Of greater interest is the longer-term, cumulative value of these sites. With their enrollments growing by leaps and bounds, you should be a prominent member of the club.

Glorified Directories

For all their hype, social-networking Web sites are just glorified directories ' the 21st-Century version of the phone book or the legal directory.

But unlike their forebearers, these directories give you far more control, helping you tailor your listing and manage your network in ways no traditional directory ever could.

Some people question the value of professional networking sites, given that a critical mass has yet to join them. But to my mind, avoiding social networking until it becomes widespread makes no more sense than waiting to launch a blog until everyone else has one. Would you rather lead the pack or trail behind it?

This column provides an introduction to some of the leading social networking sites. First, I discuss three general interest sites ' ones open to all comers. Next, I review sites that focus membership on legal professionals.

Linking In

While all of these sites are for networking, some cater to professional networking and others to social networking. Among the former, the leading site is LinkedIn. It claims an international membership of more than 20 million professionals from some 50,000 companies. With his 1990 play and later movie, “Six Degrees of Separation,” John Guare popularized the idea that we are all connected through the networks of people we know. LinkedIn is built on that concept, although it reduces the degrees of separation to three.

When you create a profile on LinkedIn, it becomes the hub of your network, allowing you to connect with other professionals and them with you. Your network consists of the people you connect with directly, their connections and their connections' connections, so that you are always within three degrees of connecting with anyone else.

Within your network and your extended network, you can mine for potential clients, service providers, subject experts and other contacts.

You can also search for business opportunities and for jobs or job candidates. You can directly communicate with your first-degree contacts and, through them, request introductions to others.

What you get out of LinkedIn will turn on what you put into it. As soon as you sign up, add as many contacts as possible and continue to add more from then on. In addition, enhance your profile in other ways, such as by joining groups, endorsing other members and posting or answering questions within your network.

LinkedIn costs nothing to join. Paid accounts offer extra features and options, but are not necessary to benefit from the site's basic networking tools.

Finding Friends On Facebook

In contrast to the professional are sites where the emphasis is on social interaction.

The first of these was Friendster, launched in 2002, followed soon after by MySpace. But the one attracting the most buzz generally and among legal professionals is Facebook.

Launched as a virtual hangout for college kids, Facebook is on track to have the largest and most diverse membership of any such site by year's-end.

As a social networking tool, Facebook is powerful. You can build networks around locations, interests, schools, companies or whatever. You can chat, share photos and videos, post bulletin-board style messages, play games, coordinate calendars and even advertise.

But for professional networking, Facebook falls short. One reason for this is that, unlike other sites, it hides your full profile from anyone you have not designated a “friend.”

Since joining, I have connected with a number of friends, but they are all friends I already knew ' all connections I already had through LinkedIn.

Facebook is adding features to make itself friendlier for businesses. For example, businesses can now sponsor custom pages that focus on their products or services. But its strength is in maintaining existing connections, not building new ones.

Feeling the Plaxo Pulse

A hybrid between professional and social networking is Plaxo.

At its core, it is a contacts manager. But over the past year, it has reinvented itself. Once primarily used for updating Microsoft's Outlook software, it is now a multifaceted tool for managing, tracking and networking with contacts across multiple platforms.

Where LinkedIn's emphasis is on expanding your network, Plaxo's is on strengthening it. It does this through two primary methods: synchronization and sharing.

Its cross-platform sync feature lets you tie together all your address books. Plaxo synchronizes with Outlook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Mac OS X, Hotmail and LinkedIn, as well as with mobile devices. It does the same with most calendar applications. Sharing is where Plaxo shows its social networking side. With your address book as the launching point, you can connect with the people you know who are also using Plaxo.

Once connected, any changes your contacts make to their contact information is updated in your Plaxo address book and synchronized with your Outlook and other address books.

In addition, through a feature called Plaxo Pulse, the system keeps you up-to-date with your contacts' other activities.

As your contacts update their status on Twitter, post items to their blogs, or add photos to Flickr, their updates appear on your Pulse stream.

You can also create a public profile for yourself and merge into it any of your own external feeds as a single stream. That way, someone viewing your profile will see the universe of your current activity online.

Of the three, LinkedIn is the stronger marketing tool. Facebook is a fun way to keep in contact with your circle of friends and colleagues. Plaxo is a sure route to maintaining your contacts over the long haul.

For Lawyers Only?

The problem with networking sites that limit membership to lawyers is that attorneys are their only members. Compared with open sites, restricted venues sometimes seem like the proverbial parties where no one shows up.

As I looked at lawyers-only sites, I was struck by how little networking they generate. Whether online or off, networking anticipates a community, defined by mutual interests. Call it symbiosis, call it the profit motive, but networking carries the expectation of mutual benefit. When a networking site is open broadly, that benefit may be far too attenuated to justify the effort.

That is not to condemn all lawyer-networking sites, particularly not those built around this theme of mutual benefit. That benefit is readily apparent in a site whose members are divided between general counsel looking to hire outside firms and outside lawyers looking their flirtatious best.

Ramping Up

Such is the idea behind Legal OnRamp. Members are in-house lawyers at large companies, and outside lawyers, mostly at larger firms. The latter get multiple opportunities to strut their stuff and, with any luck, establish or strengthen relationships with those on the inside.

Of the sites I reviewed, this one seemed to offer the most promise for productive networking. With its threefold focus on connections, community and content, it is a next-generation iteration of a site that's been defunct for a decade, ALM's Counsel Connect, arguably the first networking site for lawyers. The similarity may not be accidental, given that Legal OnRamp's advisory board includes David Johnson, a former Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering partner who was Counsel Connect's chair. But Legal OnRamp's more direct lineage is to the general counsel of nine blue chip companies, led by Cisco System's general counsel, Mark Chandler.

They sought a tool to automate collaboration and content sharing between in-house and outside counsel. It had to allow sharing among broad communities of lawyers while also maintaining secure areas for privacy.

The result is a multipurpose platform that cherry picks the best parts from multiple platforms: extranets, Facebook, news aggregators, research libraries, document-management systems and the proverbial water cooler. CEO Paul Lippe, himself a former GC, calls it a dynamic social system.

It is also a selective, invitation-only system. Only about half of private firm lawyers who request entr'e are allowed in, and then only if they agree to pony up not cash, but substantive articles or FAQs to be shared with other members.

Once inside, Legal OnRamp looks like other networking sites, revolving around connections among users. Unlike other sites, it puts as much emphasis on content as on connections. Up-front are various news and blog feeds. Deeper in are libraries of FAQs, law firm bulletins, research materials and legal forms.

Within this networking superstructure, users can create private areas, called “ramps” ' most created by companies. These closed-access ramps have their own, secure layers of networking tools, content libraries and collaboration tools. Cisco's, for example, includes a database of its contracts and another of its patents.

The beauty pageant aspect is a strong allure for private firm lawyers. By posting content, contributing FAQs, and participating in discussion groups, they can show their stuff in front of an elite group of potential clientele. There is even a marketplace where GCs can post RFPs.

“We're starting at the high end,” says Lippe. “It's easy to move from elite to non-elite. It's not so easy to move from non-elite to elite.”

Legal OnRamp may soon have some weighty competition. Later this year, Martindale-Hubbell will roll out its networking site, Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Like Legal OnRamp, a key focus will be on networking and knowledge sharing between in-house and outside counsel. For now, the service is in early beta testing.

On Life Support

While the symbiosis between in-house and outside counsel fuels Legal OnRamp, the absence of immediate benefit may explain why sites that lack focus falter. Consider LawLink.

A key measure of a networking site is its vitality, and this one was nearly comatose. LawLink's structure parallels that of LinkedIn: Users build networks of “trusted colleagues,” with networks extending through three degrees of relationships.

The concept works well on LinkedIn, but not at all here.

Searching for lawyers from my home state of Massachusetts, I found 107. Of those, fewer than a quarter had made even a single connection.

These are some of the same people who are on LinkedIn and have hundreds of connections there.

LawLink hosts discussion forums around various topics, but these, too, are largely dormant. An “open forum” had a total of three posts, the most recent from November 2007.

Without more reason for members to engage with one another, LawLink holds little promise, but at least it still has a heartbeat.

A similar site, Lawyer-Link, appears to be dead. The site's front page remains, but attempts to register failed, as did attempts to contact site administrators.

Communities of Interest

If the success of a networking site is tied to its support for a community of interest, then a promising launch is Pivotal-Discovery.com. Still in
beta, its target is a subset of the legal community: e-discovery and litigation professionals.

Key features include individual profiles and connections among members, group connections, forums organized by case phase, individual blogs, instructional and promotional videos uploaded by members, an industry events calendar, industry news headlines and job postings.

Another promising area is sites designed for lawyers within a single state. The Minnesota State Bar Association, for example, is piloting MyPractice. It is built using Ning, the make-it-yourself network platform backed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.

For networking with an international flavor, sample Lawyrs.net. Launched in September 2007 by a German company, it has members from more than 100 countries, ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam.

One unique feature is a directory of law firms. Each firm's listing includes practice areas and international offices, along with news and updates about the firm. Click on a particular office location and get contact information and maps specific to that office.

If retro is your thing, ESQChat.com may be your site. It describes itself as a private meeting place for attorneys to ask questions, learn more about the law and make new acquaintances.

It takes a giant step backwards to an age of chat rooms and message forums. Legal message boards rarely take off ' and these prove the point.

The bulk of the forums devoted to legal topics had no posts.

The chat rooms, likewise, were empty. So much for networking.

A Legal Social-Networking Directory

A list of the Web sites mentioned in this article.

ESQChat.com: www.esqchat.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com

LawLink: www.lawlink.com

Lawyer Link: www.lawyer-link.com

Lawyrs.net: www.lawyrs.net

Legal OnRamp: www.legalonramp.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com

MyPractice: www.mypracticelaw.org

MySpace: www.myspace.com

Ning: www.ning.com

Pivotal-Discovery.com: www.pivotaldiscovery.com

Plaxo: www.plaxo.com

Plaxo Pulse: www.plaxo.com/tour

Twitter: http://twitter.com