Law firms and social networking : One hot topic

There’s little question that social networking is one hot topic among lawyers and law firms.

I’m told my presentations on social networking and law firm business development before Legal Marketing Association events in Boston, Seattle, and Portland have been among their most widely attended events. Presentations for this fall on social networking before LMA chapters in Cleveland and a few other cities are in the works.

Yesterday, LexBlog covered social networking as part of its monthly webinar series on the best blogging practices and the response was overwhelming. Lots of positive emails coming Rob’s, Stacey’s and my way as well as plenty of ‘tweets’ on Twitter about the presentation. Based on demand, we’re going to do an encore webinar presentation in the next week or two.

Sure, Facebook, LinkedIn, Legal OnRamp, Twitter, FriendFeed, del.icio.us, and the like are new to most of us. But the concept of networking for business development has been around as long as commerce. And networking as a way of creating a word of mouth reputation has been the backbone of lawyer marketing forever.

So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to see lawyers, young and old, taking to (or at least inquiring about) these new networking mediums. But it sure feels wild to be using Twitter to network with others in what has been among the most technology challenged professions – that being the law.