Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

Unfortunately much of the news of Penn State Coach Joe Paterno's death this morning surrounds early false reports of his death.

The Seattle Times reports 'Joe Paterno death rumors flood Twitter.' Jim Romenesko has a nice story about the support the Penn State newspaper editor is receiving after his resignation for making an erroneous report of Paeterno's death.

Being on Twitter yesterday evening I can tell you Twitter was a reliable source of information on news of Paterno's grave condition and possible impending death. This, even the face of CBS news erroneously reporting of Paterno's death.

I saw the ESPN report of Paterno's grave condition while watching the Notre Dame basketball game. As I am apt to do, I started to follow 'Paterno' on Twitter on my iPad. My daughter, Ainsley, also a big sports fan, came downstairs a short time later and let my son and I know Joe had died.

I saw the report on CBS news, but 99% of the Tweets I was seeing said Paterno was in serious condition. The tweets made no mention of his death nor did they refute reports of his death. The tweets just reported Paterno was in serious condition, that family and friends were gathering at the hospital, and that Penn State students were gathering at certain locations for candle light vigils.

My conclusion, based on Twitter, was that Paterno was indeed gravely ill, but that he had not died. I believe any rational person familiar with Twitter would have reached the same conclusion.

Remember that Twitter is a raw news feed. Legendary news reporter, Walter Cronkite, had news feeds, news bureaus, and phone reports from which to digest the news before getting on TV and reporting the news to us.

We didn't get the raw feeds Walter did back in the day. Today we do.

It's up to us to make sense of the raw feeds and interpret the news.

Don't fault Twitter as an unreliable source of news. Fault the people who drew the wrong conclusions from the raw news feeds.

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The Washington Post's Emma Brown (@emmersbrown), reports this morning that Twitter enables teachers to improve their craft. Twitter's become a community of mentors offering inspiration, commiseration and classroom-tested lesson plans.

“Twitter essentially prepared me to go into my second year and not give up,” said [Jamie] Josephson, now in her third year at Woodrow Wilson High in Northwest Washington. “I never would have imagined that it would have been the place to find support.”

Josephson (known to fellow tweeters by her handle, (@dontworryteach) is one of a small but growing number of teachers who are delving into the world of hashtags and retweets, using Twitter to improve their craft by reaching beyond the boundaries of their schools to connect with colleagues across the country and around the world.

They say the camaraderie and free, instantaneous help they find through Twitter — and its steady stream of pithy messages, maximum 140 characters each — is far more useful than traditional school training programs, which often feature fixed agendas, airless rooms and canned speeches by hired experts.

“I always tell people the the most valuable 15 minutes I spend, in terms of my professional growth, is when I jump on Twitter at night and see what’s going on,” said Greg Kulowiec, a virtual colleague of Josephson’s who teaches in Plymouth, Mass.

I've been on Twitter long enough to see the same camaraderie, collaboration, and learning taking place among attorneys using Twitter.

Classifying Twitter as solely a social media tool for marketing is shortsighted. Twitter immediately connects you to relevant information and people. That's a coup for lawyers looking to become better lawyers.

We're always looking to learn via conferences and trade publications. That comes with time and expense. Not to dismiss face to face interaction and edited publications, but Twitter provides an immediate resource nearly 24 hours a day.

I've gone on Twitter and asked if anyone had a resource on this or that and received any number of responses within minutes. In addition, people following me on Twitter asked people following them for help in responding to my Twitter inquiries.

Practicing law, even in a large law firm, can be a lonely job. It's nice to connect with other lawyers with similar interests, concerns, and rewards.

Twitter provides lawyers a lift similar to that which you get at bar and industry conferences. When you do attend such events, you'll feel like you know as friends the lawyers you've been interacting with on Twitter. Relationships grow.

You'll find on Twitter that the attorneys you'll be interacting with will have similar interests -- whether they be in the law, social, or in sports. The reason being is that the news, information, and commentary that you and others share on Twitter attracts like minded people.

In addition, attorneys are finding it only natural to follow fellow attorneys they want to get to know better. The twitter handles for attorneys are readily available at websites, LinkedIn, blogs, and Google+.

Don't dismiss Twitter as only a business development tool. Don't defer to marketing professionals when it comes to Twitter.

Twitter is a gift that keeps on giving when it comes to learning, camaraderie, and growing your network -- all roads that lead to you being a better lawyer.

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Twitter has acquired Summify, a service that creates a daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks and delivers it to you by email, web or mobile.

From Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb, reporting on Twitter buying Summify:

Summify picks out key stories from a Twitter stream by scanning the user's contacts and social networks. It looks at shares of a story on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, and it considers the story's popularity within the user's own network as well as globally. The constant stream of Twitter updates can be too much to digest, so Summify built a way to automatically discover the most interesting stuff.

Josh Lynch, one of LexBlog's project managers, introduced me to Summify last year. Josh thought it a pretty cool way to stay abreast of news and developments you're interested in. Rather than saying, here's the subject I want content on, Summify delivers what you're interested in because people in your social network have tweeted the content or shared it on other social media.

I've enjoyed summify because by recognizing a face or name in an email, I feel compelled to take a peak at the content. I haven't enjoyed the inane auto-tweets from people calling out the names of people who have 'Summified' their news.

Summify is led by a group of Romanian transplants who moved to Vancouver in 2010 to become part of a business incubator. Summify feels their vision is closely aligned with Twitter's, thus the acquisition.

Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.

Changes are coming to Summify immediately, per Mitchell.

Starting today, Summify has disabled new account registrations and some features. Summaries can no longer be public and profile pages and influence pages are gone. Summify used to auto-tweet for a user after generating a summary, mentioning the people whose links were featured, but this feature is now disabled.

Existing users of Summify will still get their private summaries via email and the iPhone app, but "at some point," the team says, "we will shut down the current Summify product."

I blogged last week about Twitter entering the news publishing business with Twitter's hiring of a BBC sports social media editor in order to cover the 2012 London Olympics.

Twitter's acquisition of Summify further signals a move by Twitter into the publishing space. Publishers, and the editors they employ, curate content. Through curation, a publisher enables its readers and users (in the case of the Web) to discover relevant information, news, and commentary.

Twitter has become the oxygen fueling news distribution. News produced by citizen journalists, via blogs and coverage via Twitter itself, as well as news from the historical mainstream media. But with so much content gushing from the Twitter pipe, we need curation to facilitate discovery.

Tools like Summify add a powerful 'human layer' to the technology Twitter is developing to curate content.

Don't expect Twitter or Summify to exist long term in their present form. Expect Twitter news and information sites automatically displayed based on your interests - on both desk tops and mobile devices. That atmosphere will enable Twitter as a publisher to derive greater ad revenue.

It's all good for you as a attorney and law firm, if you're making effective and knowledgeable use of social media. Networking, relationship building, engagement, and reputation enhancing opportunities are only going to grow.

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The Wall's Polly Becker reports Twitter is adding 11 accounts per second.

According to Twopchart, the number of Twitter accounts is now up to 465 million registered accounts and it will hit the 500 million landmark on Febraury 25th.

That’s around nine months after it passed the 300 million mark in May of last year.

......Twitter passed the 400 million mark in the early autumn and as you might expect that growth has been accelerating. Twitter has effectively grown by more than 65 million accounts since autumn and Twitter wants that to continue as it tries to reach to consumers.

With such growth there is always going to come automated spammers and users who register and do not come back. But, by and large, Twitter users are engaged. Twitter CEO, Dick Costello, reports Twitter had 30% of their monthly active users login every day at the beginning of 2011. By year's end it was 50%.

Just checking now, Twitter is registering 12.3 users a second. Here's a chart from twopcharts measuring Twitter's growth over the last 24 hours.

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There's no question that social media is having a significant impact on science per an article in Forbes by Haydn Shaughnessy (@haydn1701) entitled 'How Could Twitter Influence Science.'

The bottom line is simple: articles that many people tweeted about were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than those who few people tweeted about. Its implications are even more interesting. It generally takes months and years for papers to be cited by other scientific publications. Thus, on the day an article comes out, it would seem to be difficult to tell whether it will have a real impact on a given field. However, because the majority of tweets about journal articles occur within the first two days of publication, we now have an early signal about which research is likely to be significant.

The relationship is not even marginal. 11x more likely is a huge influence. The research appeared in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and was conducted by its editor Gunther Eysenbach.

There has been some push back on the study because some tweets from scientists and publishers were sent out automatically, without human interaction. People have also argued that certain works tweeted about were not peer reviewed.

But the BMJ Group, publishers of the British Medical Journal, nails the bottom line:

Whether or not you agree with the validity of Eysenbach’s study, the very fact that it has been published and discussed so widely is surely a testament to the increasing importance of social metrics in evaluating article impact.

Like science, we're hearing in the law, "But these blogs and open source articles published on line are not peer reviewed." To which Shaughnessy responds as to science in way which applies equally to the law:

Peer-review has served scholarship well, but is beginning to show its age. It is slow, encourages conventionality, and fails to hold reviewers accountable. Moreover, given that most papers are eventually published somewhere, peer-review fails to limit the volume of research.

As scholars migrate their publication to the web, and publish earlier, the web offers a better way to filter science or as Altmetrics (project set up to discuss the post-peer review environment) puts it: “Instead of waiting months for two opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and bookmarks in a week.”

Two take aways for me as to attorneys and our legal profession.

One, get involved in social media beyond your blog. If you build up social media equity on Twitter by sharing niche news and commentary other than your own, you'll build up a significant number of loyal followers. When you post to your blog, your articles will then be widely shared on Twitter.

You'll then get cited in blogs, news sites, and publications. Just ask lawyers who blog well. Getting cited on-line as an attorney is highly influential. In time you'll be viewed as a subject matter expert and sought out as a reliable and trusted authority in niche areas of the law.

Two, doesn't what Shaughnessy points out regarding science and social media apply to legal scholarship?

• We are creating knowledge in new ways but have a philosophy of science modeled on a pre-web way of working; we still tend to think of science and any rigorous thinking as an object that we collectively cultivate and grow. I wonder if this is a useful analogy any longer.
• Eysenbach’s research may be a useful early indicator of how social is changing science publishing but also a lesson for the wider community of opinion formers that opinion forming is itself changing and we need to understand its more fluid nature
• What we know will change. For decades it has mattered where you publish and peer review has been a brake on some innovative perspectives. It has tended to defend established viewpoints. The possibility is that new interpretations of experience can evolve and evolve rapidly. It needs a new philosophy of knowledge.

Though I am on the periphery of legal scholarship no longer practicing law and having never been smart enough to pen law review articles, I think I see enough of what's going on in legal publishing to comment intelligently.

We do have pockets of legal scholars advancing the law through blogging and real time publishing. We also have a limited number of our endowed law professors citing the now on-line published legal commentary of practicing lawyers. The Volokh Conspiracy and some the blogs listed at Paul Caron's site, Law Professor Blogs come to mind.

But by and large, law schools and the large legal publishers (LexisNexis, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Reuters) remain focused on peer reviewed and edited legal work.

Expect to see big change. Like open source software, you cannot hold back what comes naturally to smart people.

In the law that means open source publishing. As a practicing attorney you have a wonderful opportunity to jump in.

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I just shared on Twitter a story in the National Law Journal by Karen Sloan entitled 'What is law school for anyway?'

As is my habit, I wanted to attribute the story to Sloan in my tweet. I also wanted to let Sloan know of my interest in the subject of the story and who I am. If I blog about Sloan's story, I want to include her Twitter handle as well.

It only makes sense that reporters want to know who is amplifying their stories and who in the business has an interest in the subjects the reporter writes on. After all, they'd be good sources for future stories.

The best way for me to give Sloan the attribute and let her know I am out here is to list her Twitter handle in my tweet, ie, "What is law school for anyway? - @Karen Sloan." The problem is that I couldn't find a Twitter handle for sloan. Googled her. Checked in her LinkedIn profile. Nothing.

Many reporters at major publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian include their Twitter handle in their byline. The reporters know Twitter is a more effective means of engaging readers than email.

Think about the impact of a Tweet of mine which includes a legal reporter's Twitter handle. The reporter is identified for 12,000 plus of my followers. Many of my followers will retweet what I shared with their trusted followers, again identifying the reporter. My Tweet will be indexed by Google and Twitter Search so that the reporters name can be identified in searches ad infinitum.

Forget the ego part as a a reporter. That's not the point.

Having a Twitter handle is being polite to those who publish via social media like me. It also gets your name out there among readers and people in the know that you cover topics they're interested in.

Reporting is two way today. Having a Twitter handle is needed to enable the two way engagement.

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Could Twitter morph into a publishing platform for the curation of news, whether done by Twitter itself or existing publishers? Appears so, based on a couple stories this morning.

The first comes Ingrid Lunden (@ingridlunden) who reports that Twitter UK has poached BBC sports social media editor, Lewis Wiltshire, just in time for the London Olympics.

Lewis Wiltshire has been playing a big role in how the BBC would cover this year's Olympics across various platforms. Wiltshire reported via Twitter that in his new role he will certainly be focusing on sport in the UK.

Lunden is going to be talking to Twitter to find out more including:

...[H]ow/if this represents a new chapter in how the company plans to do more curation of information that passes through its network every day. That, at least, is certainly where an opportunity lies in hiring someone like this.

It appears Twitter is jumping on the Olympic's decision to clamp down on Tweeting by athletes and reporters with the mainstream media which bought the coverage rights.

Just 'end run' the Olympics and the mainstream media and do reporting on your own by curating Tweets from attendees and the like. There's no way the Olympics is going to shut down Twitter - ask the former Egyptian and Libyan governments.

State side, Justin Ellis (@JustinNXT), Assistant Editor, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, reports the Boston Globe is quietly testing a redesign of its Your Town product on Boston.com to give it a “real-time feel” by curating a Twitter stream of stories and information.

Your Town is a network of 50 sites dedicated to local news in the towns surrounding Boston. The goal of Jim Bodor (@jimbodor), director of product development for Boston.com, is to create a “dashboard for a reader’s community.”

With just a reporter and editor, the new look will aggregate individual tweets hand-plucked from locals identified as prominent Tweeters in the community, displaying them inline with other news in the feed. A tweet earns the same visual rank as a Globe story, each its own solo news item.

From Ellis:

It’s common for news sites to include Twitter widgets displaying their own tweets or those from trusted sources, but it’s rare to see tweets themselves — particularly non-staff-produced tweets — displayed as a unit of news. Bodor said what’s happening on Twitter is part of the broader news discussion in a community, one that a segment of readers already knows about. This amplifies that to a larger audience and creates a richer site, he said.......Employing Twitter makes for a good two-for-one opportunity. By sourcing and prominently featuring tweets from the community Your Town not only can add to the amount of content on sites but also extend a hand to readers and create a more engaged audience. That’s important because the Your Town sites are in a competitive local-news space that includes Patch sites as well as the Wicked Local network competing on school coverage, traffic and road updates, and sports from Pop Warner on up.

Don't look at this 'Twitter publishing' as just providing raw Tweet text. That could look pretty boring.

Flipboard runs, in large part, on curated Tweets. The story behind the Tweet and accompanying images are displayed by Flipboard in an eloquent digital magazine interface. Twitter, itself, and publishers using Twitter as part of their publishing platform could do the same.

What's this mean for law firms and legal publishers?

For law firms, it presents a golden opportunity. Identify prominent Tweeters in the industry or community you're looking to engage. You can then run relevant news and information fed to you via Twitter along side blog posts by your lawyers and guest bloggers on a blog or custom social media solution. You'll have the leading news publication in a niche without a major investment of time and expense.

For legal publishers, it means avoiding the end run. Relying on traditional top down reporting isn't going to cut it anymore. Your subscribers need and want information you simply cannot keep on top of. You also need to keep your subscriber base and industry engaged. Publishing at them, as opposed to with them, is not going to keep anyone engaged.

And to think many in the legal industry blew off Twitter as a gimmick a couple years ago. Scary part is some still do.

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Tim Bradshaw and Richard Waters of the Financial times report that Twitter's advertising model is still a work in progress.

But Twitter from a journalistic standpoint is a big hit. Per Mark Read, chief executive of WPP Digital:

Twitter is more of a journalistic than a marketing phenomenon. If you talk to newspaper editors and people in the media, they are obsessed.

By contrast, Twitter is “still trying to figure out” its advertising products.

For the right category of marketers – those that involve entertainment properties, personalities, launches and news, those that have their own content or sponsor events – it’s pretty relevant. But it requires a greater degree of sophistication than other forms of online advertising.

Newspaper editors. People in the media. Marketers with personalities and content. That's a good fit for law firms and attorneys.

Good law firms have always leveraged the media and newspapers to get the word out on their attorneys. Attorneys that were personalities had more success.

Content has always been at the heart of law firm business development. Attorneys writing articles for trade and industry publications has historically been a way to drive one's reputation. Today publishing a blog accelerates relationships and an attorney's word of mouth reputation.

Though some advertisers such as FindLaw will pay $1 to $4 for each new follower through “promoted accounts,” Twitter requires some finesse to realize engaged followers and relationships with customers and influencers, such as bloggers and mainstream media professionals.

For lawyers you are personally using Twitter, not having a ghost Tweet for them, Twitter offers a strong return. Anita Newton, vice-president of retail and digital marketing at AMC Theatres, told the Financial Times, "The level of activity and interest on the part of our followers is greater than any other channel.”

No question Twitter's advertising revenue is going to grow. But for lawyers there's more to gain from Twitter as a method to engage others and receive timely information from relevant people.

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Bloomberg's Tom Schoenberg reports that three WikiLeaks backers lost their bid to keep information from their Twitter accounts from being turned over to U.S. prosecutors investigating the group’s publication of classified information.

U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Virginia, yesterday denied a request by the backers that the information sought by prosecutors be blocked while a federal appeals court considers their challenge. O’Grady, in his ruling, said the appeal has little chance of success because existing case law “overwhelmingly” supports the government’s position.

“Litigation of these issues has already denied the government lawful access to potential evidence for more than a year,” O’Grady said in his ruling. “The public interest therefore weighs strongly against further delay.”

U.S. investigators had served Twitter with a subpoena requesting subscriber names, contact information, billing records, user activity, Internet protocol addresses and source and destination e-mail addresses.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the U.S. subpoena violated privacy and First Amendment rights under the Constitution. A U.S. Magistrate ruled last March that the three Wikileaks backers lacked standing because the government did not seek the actual content of their Twitter communications.

When O'Grady upheld the Magistrate's ruling, the three filed an appeal last month with the U.S. Appeals Court in Richmond, Virginia. O’Grady refused to block prosecutors from obtaining the data while pending the appeal on the basis that there was little chance for success on appeal.

From Kim Zetter reporting for Wired:

The government is seeking the records under 18 USC 2703(d), a provision of the 1994 Stored Communications Act that governs law enforcement access to non-content Internet records, such as transaction information. More powerful than a subpoena, but less so than a search warrant, a 2703(d) order is supposed to be issued when prosecutors provide a judge with “specific and articulable facts” that show the information sought is relevant and material to a criminal investigation. But the people targeted in the records demand don’t have to be suspected of criminal wrongdoing themselves.

Here's a copy of Judge O'Grady's Memorandum Opinion (pdf) denying Petitioners Motion to stay to stay the Court's November 11, 2011 Order and enjoin enforcement of Magistrate Judge Buchanan's December 14, 2010 Order directing Twitter to disclose the records.

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