the virtual legal marketplace

8/8/2019 The Virtual Legal Marketplace

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Lawyers have been cautious aboutusing socialnetworking butaregradual& embracing the useofsocialsitessuch asFacebook, Linkedln and Twitter. Web 2. 0continues to challenge lawyers as theyrealize that optingoutofthis new system ofconnection may equalopting out ofbusinessBy Marzena Czarnecka

lawyers being who they are - and big law firms in particularbeing the institutions that theyare - the tendency in the profession has been to worry about potential dangers of themediumfirst and jUIJ1P on opportunities third ... or last.In 1999, there were still law firms that didn't have a website

- or much ofone - and lawyers who eschewed the conveniencesof e-mail for the comparative security of the courier and thetelephone.

Sometimebetween 1999and 2009, law firms got it and today,the competitive practice of law without those tools is impossible, virtually and practically. But the web is ever-changing, andits 2.0 incarnation is challenging law firms again. The culpritthis time: social networks and social media, as personified byFacebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other ever-multiplying socialsites. The reaction ftom the profession?

Cautious. But not dismissive.

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"Lawyers are way behind the curve, and that'sprobably as it should be," says Simon Fodden,professor emeritus wi th Osgoode Hal l LawSchool and blogger extraordinaire. "They're a

very traditional conservative group by and large." Plus, he adds,they don't get much payofffrom beingearly adoptets. "Ie's saferto be the second man on the moon - or in the third or fourthfljght to the moon - than the first," he quips. "I think it's verysensible for law firms to be a little conservative with new toolsand media:

Best reason to delay: most of them don't do law firms anygood until their clients adopt them anyway.he: web has challenged law firms from its inception, and

ne evening there was a remarkable breakdown of the localtelephone system. Anyone whopicked up the phone could heareveryone else at once. Hundredsof voices - some sounding

distant, some: close by - hovered in the first social virtual spaceI had ever experienced.An instant society of children formed,brilliantlysuperior to that of the schoolyard ...."

Thus writes Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist-artist-entrepreneur who coined the term virtual reality in the 1980s,about the seminal childhood experience that inspired him towork towards developinga communicationmedium that would"subvert" the rules of the physical schoolyard - or brick andmortar workplace - and dangle the promise of "a virtual agorathat brings out the best in people."

Lanier's first virtual reality' experience, detailed in "AChildhood Between Realities," an essay in John Brockman'sCurious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist (PantheonBooks,2004), recounts the telephone system breakdown.Whileadults panicked and railed against the telephone company, thechildren played with the possibilities. Small wondel" perhaps,that those children, Lanier included, went on to invent theweb and continued to playwith its possibilities, giving rise toits more and more complex incarnations, each one ofwhich isgenerally characterized by improved, more sophisticated - si-multaneously more intimate and more virtual - communication tools.

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Delicious is a social bookmarking site where members sharetheir favourite bookmarks. Harron waS an early adopter of itscapabilities: it was a convenient way to organize the information he was gathering, and an easy way to share it with interested colleagues.Inadvertently - but perhaps inevitably - the Delicious

bookmarks have become his most powerful business development tool."'When I go into a negotiation, I always arm myself with

all publicly available agreements of the other side," Harronexplains. For the most par t, these are publicly discloseddocuments available via SEDAR, the Securities ExchangeCommission and other sources, but finding them requiressome digging. Harron's done the digging - and in the spiritofWeb 2.0, he doesn't think everyone else should replicate hiseffort. (A big change, notes Fodden, from the old-schoolmodelof closelyguarded knowledge, within the legal profession andwithout.) Instead, people searching for specific pharmaceutical licensing agreements can - and do - go to hrrp://delicious.com/JamesHatton/agreement and find what they need.As they usethe bookmarksHatton has collected, theymake

them berrer. User suggestions help Hatton refine his sortingtags, identify new areas to track and occasionally bring to hisattention to agreements he may have missed. That makes hisjob easier.Then there's the profile and the pay-off "I just got a call

from a patent lawyer in Seattle, who called me after lookingat the Delicious bookmarks, and told me he's just been talkingabout them with his boss," says Harron. There's a file in theoffing. "For me, that's gold."Here's the tricky part, though. The pay-offs there chiefly

because Hatton's "gift" to the Delicious community was, andis, a sincere one, with no strings attached. There's no "sell" onthe site, no "hire me because I'm the expert in this field" sign."This culture demands that type of behaviour," says Jorge

Colon, a Florida lawyer and founder of the Online Bar Association (beta site at www.theonlinebar.com).a n'ascent globalprivate membership organization of lawyers who practiseonline or want to learn how. "You're required to be generousand to participate, and the currency you're creating is built by ;howgenerous you are in supportingother people."Colon is an active member of several social networks. Key

among them is Keith Ferrazzi's online and IRL (that'sweb talkfor "in real life") Greenlight Community. Ferrazzi is one ofthe leading gurus of social networking 21st century and Web2.0 style. The theme that tuns through Ferrazzi's proliferatingbooks and articles (the bible isNeverEatAlone:AndOtherSecrets to Success, One Relationshipata Time; the newest one is

Fodden doesn't practise what he preaches: he is an earlyadopter ofmany of the web's socia! tools.He embraced blogginglong before it hit the mainstream, and four years ago, he took itto a new level in the legal market by pulling together other enthusiasts into slaw.ca, "a Canadian co-operative blog about anyand all things legal."The blog initially had a research and "library" bent - indeed,

law firm librarians, frequently the leaders in communicationand information technology adoption at law firms, remain keycontributors and readers - but as it evolved, its constituencyand reach broadened. Current core contributors includeOgilvyRenault LLP's Jeremy Gruschcow, Hicks Morley HamiltonStewart Storie LLP's Daniel Michaluk and McInnes Cooper'sDavid T.S. Fraser, author of the Canadian Privacy Law Blog(www.privacylawyer.ca/blog). as well as Heenan Blaikie LLP'sSimon Chester, AlejandroManevich and EvanVanDyk.Other marquee law firms are represented by occasional con

tributors: Torys LLP byElizaberh Ellis; Stikeman Elliott LLPby David Tournier and Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay; FaskenMartineau DuMoulin LLP by Alex Cameron; and BennettJones LLP by Brenda Johnson. Lenczner Slaght Royce SmithGriffin LLP's Glenn Smith writes a column, as does Fulbright& Jaworski LLP's NewYork partner Robert Owen. You'll alsofind Carol Lynn Schafer from Winnipeg's Pitblado LLP hereand Jeffrey Vicq from Vancouver's ClarkWilson LLP, as wellas Aird & Berlis LLP's Angela Swan. Pitblado, Clark Wilson,Heenan Blaikie and Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG) additionally allmaintain firm guest blogs with slaw.Not bad for a "labour of love" that sells nothing, advertisesnorhing, earns norhingand pays its contributors nothing.But that's theMO ofWeb2.0 and social media - orshould be."The web developed as a gift culture, a gift economy," says

Fodden. It 's a marketplace unlike any other - at its best, thevirtual Utopia Lanier envisioned during the telephone systemcrash of his 1970s childhood - a place where people give theirexpertise and time away for fr"Ce.Is it worth it?

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Fr James Hatton, a partner with Vancouver's Farn's,Vaughan,Wills & Murphy LLP, the answer is an un-

o equivocal yes.Hatton has a personal profile on Facebook and

a professional one on LinkedIn. He's had a blog on licensing(www.jameshatton.com/public/) since 2003, and, morerecently, he's started playing with Twitter. But his big "gift"to the web is an exhaustive list of links to publicly availablepharmaceutical commercial licensing agreements, hosted onDelicious (http://delicious.com).


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THE VIRTUAL LEGAL MARKETPLACEWhosGot YOur Back: The Breakthrough Program toBuildDeep,Trusting Relationships That Create Success and Won't Let YouFail) is deceptively simple.Colon presents it as an acceleration of intimacy: "Ifyou were

somebody that I wanted to meet and have a business relationship with, how could I accelerate the intimacy, so that in a shortperiod of time we feel connected?" he says. Used appropriately,social media foster those connections. "And then opportunitiesjust happen," says Colon.It works for individual lawyers. Hatton is full of stories of

connections made via Delicious and Linkedln contacts. Doesit work for law firms as institutions?It should. But, perhaps ironically given the greater r e s ~ u r c e s

institutions Can bring to bear on the process, it's harder.

Srah Dale-Harris is an associate with the Torontooffice of Davis LLP and a participant in a variety ofsocial media. She blogs for the firm and as an individual- and she's acutely aware of the difference.

"To a certain extent, I'm always conscious of being a Davispartner and aware that whatI do online reflects on the firm,"she says. Butwhen she's bloggingasSarahDale-Harrisfirst, she'sable to be more personal, more opinionated, more - to borrowColon and Ferrazzi's favourite web adjective - intimate. An individual blog allows "more chance to inject my own personality"; a firm blog is generally meant to take a "neutral position."The inevitable slippery slope from neutral to boring - or

redundant, as every competitor churns out a similar "neutral"blog on the similar issue - is an obvious danger. But the newtools mitigate it somewhat.For one, the audience of most social media self-selects: they

want to hear ftom the firm. They choose to flag its tweets andfollow them to blogs or web pages. This self-selection may meanthat the audience a firm ends up with isn't necessarily the one itwants to be targeting - but it's an interested audience.

The user statistics one can get about that audience should helpa firm further refine and target it, says Simone Hughes, chiefmarketingofficer and national director for business developmentwith BLG. Its nascent Twitteraccounthas about200 "followers,"about 57 per cent of whom :fie lawyers. Oddly enough, 24 arefrom Ecuador. No one at BLG is sure why, but it's one of thetrends Hughes and her team are trackingas they try to figure outhow to effectively use Twitter and other social media.The final" kickin the butt" driver, incidentally, behind BLG's

current social media strategy - developed over the last year and"prioritizing and ranking" most of the popular and some lessso of the currently available channels - was the realization howmuch of an online presence the firm had that wasn't created,

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Sarah Dale-Harris; Davis LLPmuch less updated or monitored, by it. "Therewas somuch misinformation out there, dead pages, things about us that were outof date or just wrong," says Hughes.Getting thatmessageout there - andmaintainingit - requires

a great deal of sweat equity. BLG's got two full-time staffon itright now; they could ,probably use more. But apart from thepeople power required, the financial investment required tomake an impacton the web is actually pretty minimal.That's had a profound influence on business development decision-making at law firms, says Stuart Wood, chiefmarketingofficer at Torys LLP."The financial investment is low," Wood stresses, which

means a law firm can test thewaters without breaking thebank."I like placing small bets on these new technologies and newways of getting information out there," he continues. "You don'tmake a huge investment, but you get a chance to see who showsup, what the reaction is, see what clients get excited about, whatlawyers get excited about."That 's the thinking behind Torys' new YouTubeChanne l (www.youtube.com/torysmedia). "We hadthe podcasts and videos on our website anyway," saysWood. Cost and effort ofputtingthem on YouTube?Minimal. The pay-off? Still under evaluation at Torys. Theonline legal community has given the venture a thumbs-up.Law is Cool (www.lawiscool.com). the law school blog and

podcast f rom Canada, loves it. Wri tes founder Omar Ha-


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THE VIRTUAL LEGAL MARKETPLACE

Sameer Dhargalkar; Ogilvy Renault LLPRedeye, "This is what I've been waiting fot.... This projectshows that the firm understands that students want a humanface to firms that often appear i n t i m i d a t i n g . ~ (He adds that theventure proves that "social media and viral videos are no longerfor small firms or solo p r a c t i c e s ~ - ifTorys is doing it, they'vegone mainstream.)Lawlibrarian Connie Crosby, one of the Canadian lawweb's

leading "info d i v a s ~ (she's a slaw.ca contributor and author ofan award-winningand widely followed blog, available at http://conniecrosby.blogspot.coml), is a fan too, flagging it as one ofher favourite videos on her YouTube user page.There are critics. Legal Post's Mitch Kowalski was under

whelmed: " ... Torys doesn't understand video. It seems that noone at the firm actuallywatches YouTube."But, as Wood sees it, if this project, or just about any other

social media offering, is a flop, Torys can pull the plug on itmuch more quickly than it would have been likely to move tojunk an unpopular but expensive print brochure."You don't feel obligated to stickwith it ifjt doesn'twStk," he

says. "Ifyou tryTwitter, and nobodyshows up, you don'tattractany followers, you can just shut it down." Whereas when youhave thousands of hard copies of some materials that stink ...well, it takes awhile for the vested parties to agree to write it off.No t everyone in the legal industry is a cheerleader, of course.

Adam Lepofsky, president oflegal recruiter RainMaker Group,notes that as theywork right now,social network tools are tabooin the recruitment world beyond the juniorassociate level:

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"We've got to be very careful with them, because everythingwe do around partner recruitment is so confidential," he says.Most of the partners he works with would "sooner die" thanlet i t be known on LinkedIn, much less Facebook, that they'reopen to job offers."We do it the old-fashioned way," says Lepofsky. "We talk a

lot on the telephone." And the really old-schoolway: theymeetin person. "Because it 's all relationship-based, and you can'treplace the personal meeting at these levels."

As a result, Lepofskydoesn't use socialmedia for businessdevelopment purposes. He sees their utility, however, for his colleagues

. who work with associates, and perhaps even partners in certainniche areas. He's skeptical- but he's notwriting them ofThat's an important lesson. The lawyerwhowroteof fe-mail

in 1999? Eating his words. But then, he's in good company.Fodden and slaw.cawrote of fTwitterwhen it firSt came out."We looked at it andsaid we don't think so," he admits. You

can view the blog post to that effect in slaw.ca's archives. Now,Fodden tweets regularly, announcing newslaw blogposts threeto five times a day. Plus, he's just set up aTwitter feed that alertsfollowers whenever a new SupremeCourt decision is released."It's important to be aware of what's happening as much as

you can, and to notdisdain it," he says.5meer Dh"galb,. di,,,,w, of b.';n", dovclopm""at OgilvyRenault LLP, agrees. He's "bullish" on manyof the social networks and media gaining speed on theweb and in the legal community (his biggest bet rightnowis onTwitter, although tweets have a lot of evolving to dostil l- according to a recent survey by PearAnalytics, 40.55 percent of the traffic on Twitter is still "pointless babble").He's lessa fan of the suddenly proliferating "closed" communities likeLegal OnRamp and Martindale-Hubbell' Connected.Unlike L inkedIn o r the ubiquitous Facebook, closed

networks limit membership based on somepredefined criteria;i n the case of Legal OnRamp (www.legalonramp.com) andMartindale-Hubbell' Connected (www.martindale.com/connected) and their ilk, to lawyers only. Dhargalkar sees thesurface attraction (it seems that manylawyers like hangingoutjust with other lawyers), but as a true social networking andbusiness development tool, he says, "closed networking communities have limited benefits." The obvious one: most of yourclients can't find you there.That's howJeremy Grushcowof Ogilvy Renaultin Toronto,

who is a social network enthusiast, sees it too. "I've avoidedthose industry-specific. sites to date," he says. "My sense is thatlawyers are notthathard to fmd, and theprimaryvalue ofsocialnetworking for me isn't about finding other lawyers."


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THE VIRTUAL LEGAL MARKETPLACEStill, neither Grushcow nor Dhargalkar are writing these sites

off, nor is the firm discouraging Ogilvy Renault lawyers fromjoiningthem atwill. "We'remonitoringthem,and although I don'tsee the value right now, they, especially Legal OnRamp, could beinteresting," Dhargalkar says. "Butwe don't impose social networkpreferences on students, associates, staffor partners."That's not howWeb 2.0works."I hear from people at other firms, the talk that we have to

harness this and get every one of our lawyers on Linkedln, andcreate a Facebookpage for our firm, and get all the lawyers to participate - it's never going towork thatway,"Dhargalkar says. "It'slike when a couple of years ago everyone was clamouring aboutblogging, and trying to get all their lawyers to blog. Well, mostlawyers just aren't good ar blog-typewriting. And if you get blogsghostwritten, that's not genuine."And Web 2.0 is all about sincerity. So what's a 700-lawyer law

firm to do? "You have to let the passionatepeople lead," saysDhargalkar. "Otherswill follow." Ornot - stayingoutof the game is anoption too. For awhile, anyway.Standing in the way of those who are eager to play, however, is

not anoption. You canplaywith your Facebook account at OgilvyRenault; ditto Torys andBLG.

"We've progressed," says Hughes. "Years ago, we did block allthis stuff"Butwhenyou wantyour lawyers todo business developmentWeb 2.0 style, you've got to let them have access to the keysites, right?Umm ... maybe. Eventually. A recent informal survey by

Boston lawyer Doug Cornelius - published (where else?) on hisblog (http://dougcornelius.com) - had 4S per cent of respondentsindicting their law firms for blockingsocial networking sites. Likemost tech-savvy lawyers, Cornelius is not a fan of the practice.Hefreely admits there are dangers, be they privacy concerns or timewaste issues. But blockage is not the answer.

"You canjustas easily access these sites from iPhoneorBlackBerry as you can from a firm computer," Corneliuswrites. "Blockingdoes notstop the bad behaviour thatyouare trying toprevent."

Davis's Sarah Dale-Harris andJustin Mooney agree.Ironically, Davis, which has been an early adopterof several of the social media as a firm, and whichencourages its lawyers to blog, tweet and virtuallynetworkin otherways, blockssites such as Facebook in theoffice.Dale-Harris and Mooney both use Facebook regularly (at work?Maybe. As Mooney points out, it's not that hard for a tech-savvy person to override the block.Or pop out the BlackBerry ...),and whileDale-Harris is of the "Facebook is personal, LinkedInis professional" school (although you will find her in the "I'm aLawyer But I'd Rather be a Pirate" community), for Mooney,

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Facebook is the professional rolodex ofchoice."As your practice progresses, your personal and profeSSional

livesbecome intettWined," he says. "Thepracticeoflaw is so muchabout relationships, anything you cando to cement relationshipsis agood thing, andFacebook is anotherway that facilitates that."He uses Facebook as a tool that helps "clients or new connectionsunderstand me on amore personal level." And vice-versa.His advice to other lawyers on Facebook, though, is to keep itinperspective - and use it to, inter,lfia, arrange for regular faceto-face timewith clients and prospects. "All of these things, they.are business development tools - tools," Mooney stresses.And tools that sometimesworkin mysterious - atleastindirect

- ways. Grushcow delivers the example that for him, defineswhatsocial networks should be, for lawyers and for business peopletoday."The value ofmy network is not as adirectory, it's as something

that has the ability to connect people who are in it," he says. Apersonal friend who's a contact on Linkedln notices that one ofGrushcow's connections is an executive at a company the friendis interested in. The friend requests an introduction. Grushcowscnds an e-mail. "Theygettogetherforlunch,andhowthey'redoing business together. That's a perfect example of whatLinkedln does for people."

Is web. 2.0, in its best aspects characterized by developingsocial networks, focus on dialogue, and acollaborative"gifr"culture the agora virtual reality's father Jaron Lanier envisioned in the 1970s? Maybe. Lanier himself is optimistic,

but cautious - Web 2.0 and thesocial networks ir hasenabled todate are just the beginning. "I believe that there is a new form ofexpression, as fUl1damental as language, thatwill comeintobeingas we learn to makevirtualworlds a means of interpersonal connection," hewrites.Andwhilenooneexpectslawyersandlawfirms to lead theway,

optingout fromparticipating in these new systems ofconnectionand communicationmay well equal optingout ofbusil1ess."If the real estate mantra is location, location, location, for

business communication today the three most importantwordsare web, web andweb," says H u g h e ~ "Ifyou're not up on whattheweband socialmedia can J o - , y ~ u willbe behindin business."Fadden is sure law firms will figure it out. "The curve is accelerating," he says. "I t took 20 years for lawyers to get used toe-mail, and 10 years to get used to Interhet. Blogging took fiveyears to gomainstream, and it will beperhaps two for Twitt

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