Twitter multi-screen partnerships a role model for legal publishing
Jeff John Roberts (@jeffjohnroberts), legal and media reporter for GigaOm and paidContent, reports that “Twitter is teaming up with everyone from Bloomberg Television to Major League Baseball as the social media site expands its range of “multi-screen partnerships.”
Why? To provide advertisers who advertise on TV an integrated cross-platform tool for reaching the social conversation wherever it happens.
You can’t turn on a sporting event or entertainment show on TV without seeing a Twitter hashtag. Every TV reporter’s Twitter handle accompanies their name on the screen.
Millions and millions of Americans are enjoying an integrated experience with television via the iPad’s on their armrests and the smartphones in their palms. In some cases they’re creating the media with their questions and comments which are then integrated into the live broadcast.
What’s this have to do with the law? We’re operating split screens in legal publishing.
One one hand we have traditional publishers (Thomson-Reuters-West, LexisNexis, Wolters Kluwer, Bloomberg) providing legal research materials, case law, statutory and regulatory law, treatises, and journals.
One the other hand we have tens of thousands of lawyers, law professors, and law students, via social media and blogging, publishing and sharing insight and commentary on the law. Such insight is more timely, and arguably more peer reviewed than anything we’ve ever had in the law before.
The two need to tied together in a “multi-screen” partnership. And maybe it need not be multi-screen. Each time a lawyer goes to research a case or statute, vetted and credible social media commentary appears along side the primary law.
Wild idea? Hardly. The annotations which accompanied my Wisconsin Statutes provided by West Publishing were invaluable.
I received legislative history, case law interpretations, law review commentary, and references to American Law Review. It was this secondary interpretation which brought the law to life for me. It was this insight and commentary that framed my arguments to the Court.
Social media insight via blogs, Twitter, and the like is going to come to the law in a “multi-screen partnership.” It’s inevitable.
LexBlog is doing its best to play a role by providing good lawyers a professional turnkey publishing. Not just technology, design, and marketing, but coaching on a strategy and what good blogging entails. We want our lawyers to be their in the “multi-screen partnership.”
In addition, we want to play a role in curating good legal insight and commentary via LXBN. Rather than looking at blogging as solely a vehicle to grab attention and social media as a distribution channel for whatever is reduced to digital copy in a lawyers name, we want to harness valuable insight and commentary provided by passionate lawyers.
Such a “multi-screen partnership” is a win/win for lawyers and publishers. Publishers cannot continue to go on without what is arguably over half of the legal insight and commentary being published and shared.
For lawyers? Imagine being cited as an authority along side primary law. Imagine your commentary being cited. And imagine being called in as co-counsel because of your niche expertise by a lawyer doing research.
What do you think? Do you see a “multi-screen partnership” taking place in the law?
