Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Blawgs, Law Firm Marketing

What started as a snowball has become an avalanche. That's lawyers using LinkedIn as their preferred directory and the evangelism of LinkedIn by marketing and PR professionals serving the legal profession.

The latest comes from Oliver Picher, president of Visible Influence, speaking about LinkedIn and social networking to the Delaware Valley Law Firm Marketing Group.

Jason Lisi and Julie Meyer highlighted Picher's presentation in an article in The Legal Intelligencer.

• LinkedIn is for business connections much in the same way that Facebook creates personal connections.
• Philadelphia firms, such as Fox Rothschild and Reed Smith, have as many as 45 percent of their attorneys and staff holding active LinkedIn accounts.
• Legal professionals should import business contacts to identify those with LinkedIn accounts and invite them to connect.
• LinkedIn allows you to connect with others with similar interests by connecting with users who are secondarily connected to an original LinkedIn connection.
• LinkedIn's answer feature provides an additional tool for effective networking and marketing of practice areas. LinkedIn answers provide for LinkedIn members to tap -- or add to -- the knowledge of their professional network by answering questions posed by others or recommending another member as a source of information: a virtual referral.

The following point by Picher should also not be lost on Martindale-Hubbell.

Much like a free publication or commercial television, social media sites such as LinkedIn generate their own revenue from the number of users they attract as potential viewers for the advertisers who pay to market on the site. To that end, it is in the interest of the social media purveyors to provide increasingly effective tools to both retain current users and regularly attract additional new ones.

LinkedIn is adding feature after feature so as to facilitate networking between business professionals, hundreds of thousands of lawyers included. And while Martindale-Hubbell is charging thousands of dollars for directory listings and losing law firm customers as a result, LinkedIn has a growing revenue base through ads and premium listings for what is basically a free service.

LinkedIn may now be Martindale's most serious competition. Something none of us could have seen coming a year or two ago

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Who would have thunk a professional social networking site could overtake a long standing lawyer directory like Martindale-Hubbell?

But look at the growth in traffic (unique visitors per month) to LinkedIn, Martindale.com, Martindale's consumer-small business lawyer directory, lawyers.com, and FindLaw.com (total traffic, not just lawyers.findlaw.com directory) over the last year. LinkedIn is blowing them all away.

Think LinkedIn is not a lawyer directory? Think again.

Legal marketing pro, Steve Matthews, reports 98,000 more lawyers have added profiles to LinkedIn in the last two months. Brings the number of lawyer profiles at LinkedIn to, as Steve describes it, 'an incredible 216,000.' Up from the 118,000 I reported in April.

Added to this is the fact that all major law firms have detailed law firm profiles at LinkedIn.

I'm a business person and the first place I go to find information on a lawyer is LinkedIn. Before the lawyer's website. And before a lawyer directory such as martindale.com. The profiles are complete, easy to scan, and let me know if the lawyer is on the ball enough to have a LinkedIn profile.

Looks like I am not alone. As of this May, LinkedIn site traffic was at 5.6 million visitors per month, and was growing at an annual growth rate of 351%. LinkedIn has more than 20 million registered users, spanning 150 industries.

With the features LinkedIn keeps adding and the growth in prospective law firm clients using LinkedIn, I don't know how traditional lawyer directories can keep up.

Follow on posts:

• Bastrop, Texas Attorney, Joe Grady: Martindale-Hubbell is the definitive lawyer directory. True or false. Well, false. The correct answer is LinkedIn.

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I'm doing a free one hour webinar (at your computer) on Thursday, May 29 at 12 ET / 9 PT for folks in the Legal Blogging Group at LinkedIn. I've done such programs in the past for members of the legal community and they've been well received.

We'll cover, among other things:

• What are professional marketing blogs?
• Advantages of blogs for law firms
• Challenges of blogs
• Alternatives for setting up and running a blog
• How much time it takes
• Legal liability and ethics issues
• Getting firm management buy in for blogs
• Which law firms are using marketing blogs
• Your questions

Not to worry if you can't make it. We'll record the webinar and make it freely available with accompanying screenshots and online demos. You may also contact me and I can arrange another webinar at a time convenient for you.

I realize some of you may already be publishing your own blog, in which case the webinar may be too basic. But those still new to blogs should find the program helpful.

If you want to join the Legal Blogging Group at LinkedIn, click here. I'll receive and approve your request.

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LexBlog client, Vickie Pynchon, publisher of the Settle it Now and the IP ADR blogs asked yesterday why she was getting traffic to particular blog posts of hers from the home page at LinkedIn. She didn't see any of her blog posts displayed on her home page at LinkedIn.

I explained LinkedIn is displaying blog posts from influential blogs in the customized news section on the home page of each LinkedIn user. The blog posts are coming via RSS/synidication and being displayed right along with news from the major news services and publications.

Better yet, the blog content displayed is tailored for the LinkedIn user. If you're publishing a law blog on a particular niche, the content is displayed for people in the relevant industry or who have expressed an interest in that niche based on the person's use of LinkedIn.

I'm also finding significant traffic coming to my blog from LinkedIn users. Last week, three of my blog posts were being run on LinkedIn and displayed for people in the legal, marketing, and PR/communications fields.

Note that I did not see my blog posts displayed at LinkedIn. I saw the referral traffic in my blog stats. I then saw my profile being viewed by people in the above fields. I have to believe it was folks in the legal and marketing fields who saw my blog posts displayed in their custom news.

Here's a screen shot of the news section that's displayed on the home page of each LinkedIn user. My company is LexBlog, thus the display of 'LexBlog. Inc. News.' Your news will be displayed under the name of your firm.

You'll see that there's a field in which you can submit a news story. I have not submitted any of my blog posts, they're being displayed at LinkedIn on their own.

If you're going to be submitting a blog post, make sure it's a good one. Abusing the process may actually hamper getting your blog posts syndicated to LinkedIn.

As more and more major sites display blog posts by syndication it's becoming more and more important for law firms to use blog software for the syndication of their content.

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I was asked that question in a comment to my post yesterday on social networking tools.

Business through Facebook? Not directly, but it can happen through relationships you build in Facebook.

I am not a big user of Facebook, but I can see how one could get work through it. Let's say you meet someone with similar interests through a Facebook group. If you're a lawyer, perhaps they're a young in-house lawyer. You start following each other in Facebook - you share recent pictures of recreational activities with your families, you start playing scrabble in Twitter, etc. You are building out a network.

Will you get new business from the person tomorrow? Probably not. But you now know another business person whose company may need your services at some time or know of someone who may. It's a lifetime of building relationships that leads to work.

'Dig Your Well Before You Get Thirsty' is the title of a book Harvey McKay wrote years ago. His point was to build out a business network for professional success.

I'm not telling you to drop everything and jump into Facebook this weekend, just saying to be open to new things. Things that work for some folks and that don't work for others.

If I said lawyers can get work by playing golf at a country club, that doesn't mean you drop everything and start taking golf lessons and join the club for fear you would lose business if you didn't.

Golf courses are very pretty on a beautiful day and the mental challenges and nuances of the sport are attractive. But I suck at golf and don't have the patience. Probably why you'll find me at LinkedIn.

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Josh Fruchter, in sharing my post on lawyers using Twitter, raises a good question.

...[I]f a lawyer spends substantial time each day blogging, and updating Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and any other networks to which they belong (Pulse anyone???), what about life outside work? At some point, it seems to me, there isn't enough time in the day to participate regularly on EVERY site, and still maintain a healthy work life balance.

Other lawyers do regularly tell me that these goofy social networking tools you're talking about are great for you, but I'm a practicing lawyer and I simply don't have the time.

And I'm sure it seems that those of us referencing and using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the like must be spending a lot of time on these mediums. That's not necessarily so.

In one case, you use them for news - so you go there when you have the time for catching up with what's going on just like you would browse a local newspaper. Here the news and information is coming from trusted friends. They're sharing links and quick snippets of news and information. And like a newspaper, you don't read every story, you glance and browse when you have a few minutes.

In another case, you use social networking tools for networking. Duh. And like networking in real life, you do it when you have the time. And knowing that it's networking that leads to some of your best work, you work networking into your schedule. Otherwise your family goes hungry.

It's 4:30 p.m. on a Friday here on the West Coast and I haven't used any social networking tools or sites today except for leaving a comment on Josh's blog just now, posting a correction to my blog early this am, and writing this post.

So though I am a 'user' of these mediums that some may call mad and all time consuming, they do not absorb all my time. I was involved in meetings with my CFO, VP of Client Development, and Creative Director until 2 or 3 today and then working on client development matters after that.

Having said that, the seeds I planted yesterday via Twitter and LinkedIn are bearing fruit today. Took me 20 or 30 minutes yesterday to publish a blog post with links to a powerpoint and webcast of a recent webinar I did. Then shared the post with folks on Twitter.

Between people getting my RSS feeds and people following me on Twitter, I've seen mention of that powerpoint and webinar all over the place today - blogs, other folks mentioning it on Twitter, and in copies of emails my readers sent to their business associates telling them about the powerpoint and screencast. Also received some nice emails thanking me for sharing the materials.

I also spent 15 minutes on LinkedIn yesterday inviting people I had the occasion to meet via the net recently to join my my professional network at LinkedIn. I received notice today that a number of those folks accepted my invite as well as one or two thank you notes for my asking them to hook up on LinkedIn.

Bottom line is social networking tools can be used effectively without them becoming all time consuming. And like Josh guesses, 'one has to try different services and then see over time which network pays the biggest dividends, and then focus on that one.'

Now, just don't ask my wife and five kids if I spend too much time on the net. ;)

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Unlike most working folks in the professional world, Mario Sundar can legitimately say that a LinkedIn profile is all he needs to highlight his professional experience. After all, what good is a static website bio page when you're employed by a company that has grown through its ability to render such traditional methods of showcasing expertise obsolete?

As community evangelist for LinkedIn and editor of the LinkedIn blog, Mario - who also writes Marketing Nirvana, a blog covering marketing and social networking - spoke to us in an official capacity, commenting on how LinkedIn uses their official blog to communicate with users and where some the site's more recent features (groups, etc.) may ultimately become. See the full text after the jump.

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Remember the late 90's when many in the legal profession dismissed the Internet as some sort of fad?

A recent article article in Law Technology News (Is the Party Over for Social Networking?) and blog post by Martindale-Hubbell ('social networking – does not draw lawyers') reminds me of the same. Both write off lawyers use of social networking.

This at a time when LinkedIn, the leading professional social networking site, lists 118,000 profiles from those describing themselves in the practice of law and is profiling each of the largest law firms based on social networking at LinkedIn by their lawyers.

Interesting that many quoted in the Law Technology News story see the advantages and significant growth in social networking for lawyers. Nonetheless, the headline was couched to create the opposite impression.

And the headline certainly worked. New York Magazine citing the Law Technology reported 'News Attendees at the American Bar Association's ABA Techshow in Chicago have declared social-networking sites over.' No question the magazine put this in to laugh at our profession.

Martindale's position that social networking for lawyers is dead? Probably based on a combination of not knowing what is taking place and protecting their territory.

Rather than create sensational headlines to generate discussion or misleading lawyers to sell your products, let's give social networking time.

It's new. Social networking sites are still being perfected. Lawyers and legal marketing professionals are still trying to figure it out.

But like the Internet, social networking for lawyers is not a fad.

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May come as a surprise to law firms and lawyer directories, but LinkedIn, the largest and most popular professional social network, has detailed firm profiles on each of the largest law firms in the country.

LinkedIn company profiles for each of the 20 largest law firms in the country include the following info:

• Firm synopsis
• Career path of lawyers before joining the firm
• Career path of lawyers before joining the firm
• Who law firm employees are most connected to
• New hires
• Recent Promotions and position changes
• Popular firm member profiles
• BusinessWeek profile and related news
• Top locations of firm
• Top schools lawyers graduated from
• Median age
• Gender breakdown

Here's a list of the LinkedIn law firm profiles for AmLaw's top 20 largest firms with the number of their LinkedIn members in just my LinkedIn network. The total number of LinkedIn members for each firm I am sure is much higher. Click on the firm's name to see their LinkedIn profile.

• Skadden Arps: 478 LinkedIn members in my LinkedIn network
• Latham & Watkins: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Baker & McKenzie: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Jones Day: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Sidley Austin: 330 LinkedIn membersk
• White & Case: 337 LinkedIn members
• Kirkland & Ellis: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Mayer Brown: 215 LinkedIn members
• Weil, Gotshal & Manges: 316 LinkedIn members
• Greenberg Traurig: 470 LinkedIn members
• DLA Piper: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Morgan, Lewis & Bockius: 429 LinkedIn members
• Sullivan & Cromwell: 239 LinkedIn members
• Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr: 203 LinkedIn members
• O'Melveny & Meyers: 302 LinkedIn members
• McDermott Will & Emery: 307 LinkedIn members
• Shearman & Sterling: 257 LinkedIn members
• Paul Hastings: 334 LinkedIn members
• Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton: 183 LinkedIn members
• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher: 271 LinkedIn members

How are the profiles being constructed? Via social networking.

Lawyers in the firms are creating individual lawyer profiles at LinkedIn. There are 118,000 LinkedIn profiles listing their profession as a the practice of law.

Those profiles are constantly being updated. Not only by the lawyers themselves, but more importantly by LinkedIn's social networking features.

Don't look now, but LinkedIn may over the next couple years become a more effective way to get a 360 degree view of a law firm than a law firm's own website and any of the major lawyer directories.

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