Legal Professionals

Legal professionals tend to be a conservative group. So when it comes to adopting social media into their practices, I have found that attorneys and other legal professionals gravitate more to LinkedIn than any other network. In fact, when I did a search on the keyword “attorney OR lawyer” back when I started using LinkedIn six years ago, there were barely over a hundred thousand members using the words attorney or lawyer in their profile. Now there are over a million.

In 2010, attorney Kendra Brodin and I wrote an ebook called Linked into Law. We recently refreshed some of the key content so that we could release the best parts in this section. (To order the new Linked Into Law ebook, you can email me at [email protected].)

Kendra (www.LinkedIn.com/in/KendraBrodin) is the Director of Career and Professional Development at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she helps students and alumni prepare for and build a meaningful career. She is also a law firm consultant and executive coach for lawyers on personal and professional development topics such as individual and organizational leadership, goal setting and achieving, and career and life success and satisfaction.

Here are the key benefits of being a lawyer on LinkedIn:

Ability to Be Known The ways you participate in the marketplace will help define your personal and law practice brand. If you contribute and share in a positive way, you can develop a heightened reputation and become a credentialed authority in these communities.
Ability to Find Others With a moderately sized network (which is easy to build), you can develop a sufficient reach when performing advanced searches. With functional search fields, your results are more targeted so you find the people you need. You can begin your research and evaluation immediately, saving time and money when looking for vendors, employees, partners, Venture Capitalists (VCs), joint venture partners, and so forth.
Opportunity to Learn and Share LinkedIn group discussions are an excellent place to showcase your knowledge and advice. With the introduction of JD Supra Legal Updates, attorneys and legal professionals are now able to share their articles and filings across the Web. This creates authority, referrals, and the ability to generate new clients.
Ability to Connect with Group Members There are many exclusive groups, both legal- and client-industry related, that give you access to other members and people who share commonalities.
Opportunity to Show You Are plugged Into Current Technology Active participation in LinkedIn tells others you are serious and competent about networking and new technology.

Mistakes to Avoid

Lawyers are conservative for a reason. They have ethical issues that many other professions just don’t have to deal with. For that reason, we have added this section to make sure that legal professionals don’t inadvertently land in hot water using LinkedIn. Here are some mistakes to avoid.

Be Careful when Specializing

In many states, attorneys may not “specialize” unless they are specifically licensed or registered to claim specialization in a certain area of the law. And yet many—hopefully most—attorneys have a specific area of focus. When you create your list of keywords for optimizing your profile, focus on the specific areas of law you practice.

Instead of a “specialty,” try something like “My practice focuses exclusively on bankruptcy” rather than “I specialize in bankruptcy.” If you don’t have a specialty in patent law, don’t say that you have one on your LinkedIn profile; you will always want to be mindful of your state’s rules on this and abide by them.

Don’t Break Client Confidentiality

Here are some tips on avoiding breaking client confidentiality:

  • Don’t post about clients. You may be tempted to post something like “Just off the phone with client who lied to me about all the facts.” Remember that the time and date of your posting is preserved with the post, so it has the potential of revealing information to someone who might know that the client was meeting with the lawyer that day.
  • Don’t post what you are working on. Simply tweeting that you are working on a summary judgment motion (especially if you relate facts that might be unique to the case) could be a breach of confidentiality.
  • Remember that words spread. On LinkedIn and other social media, you may think you have a limited, controlled audience, but you don’t really know how many or which of your friends are connecting with and distributing your updates to people you don’t know.
  • If you wouldn’t say it to your neighbor, don’t post it!

Don’t Create Attorney/Client Relationships

LinkedIn can be an absolutely amazing place to share your knowledge and experience. But as you begin to connect with potential clients online, that very thin line of perception may be crossed. What might have been an “off the cuff” answer for you becomes a client/attorney relationship to the person with whom you are communicating. Make very clear, with disclaimers if necessary, that the information you are sharing should not be taken as legal advice.

Don’t Connect to Everyone

Normally, we recommend connecting with everyone on LinkedIn because the larger your network, the more visible you are. The more visible you are, the more likely you are to find the contacts you are looking for and be found by those looking for an attorney. In almost every case, this is a good thing. The exception is when a connection in your network disqualifies you from a case because of conflict of interest. Be selective when choosing to connect with someone.

Don’t Forget “Legal Updates”

The Legal Updates InApp enables lawyers to gain visibility on LinkedIn outside of their own networks by distributing their written work (blog posts, articles, clients alerts, etc.) to people who have opted to receive legal updates on whatever interests them or matters to their professional lives. When someone in financial services installs the app, they start getting all manner of legal content from JD Supra on banking and finance issues. People in the insurance field receive legal updates on insurance matters. Tech folks get IP, technology, and other such related updates. Anyone using the app can customize this feed with any other subjects that interest him or her. But more than that, the content always ties back to the person who wrote it, the lawyer. And if that lawyer has also installed the Legal Updates app, in a single click a reader outside of that lawyer’s network can connect to the lawyer directly on LinkedIn.

Also, lawyers who use this app can include a portfolio of their JD Supra publications directly on their LinkedIn profile—and they can upload content on either JD Supra or LinkedIn. With each upload, the legal update is also announced to their network (with a LinkedIn status update). So, you’re able to share content with your own network and grow your network by making sure your writing reaches targeted readers outside of your network.

One user of Legal Updates says, “This is networking at its best. LinkedIn users are eager to share articles of interest, recommend them to friends, and network with the authors. And Legal Updates is a nearly endless source of that sort of credentialing content.”

Ethical Considerations for LinkedIn

There is a lot of information available on the Web about ethical considerations, and I will try to pin down the most salient and important ones. Then I will leave it to you to do your own research and investigation of your state rules and their implications for your LinkedIn usage. Social media is unchartered territory for most state bar organizations, so this is fair warning to be thoughtful and above-board in all of your social media interactions.

Just as with anything else you do as an attorney, you are subject to your state ethics regulations and rules. Being online and communicating virtually may feel different than face-to-face interactions or print communications, but your online actions are just as subject to ethics rules and regulations as in-person interactions.

While you might refute the fact that social media sites like LinkedIn are intended to attract clients and should thus be exempt from these ethical considerations, that argument won’t get you too far. To try to simplify things a bit, let’s consider the three main categories that are governed by state ethics regulations:

Communications Email and other web-based interactions (like social media) constitute communications. So, just as with all other communications, be honest. Make sure what you say on any profile or web page is true and accurate. The American Bar Association (ABA) Model Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1 instructs lawyers to avoid false or misleading communication about lawyers and their services. You must be hyper-vigilant that you don’t mislead others about yourself or your services—when in doubt, downplay rather than exaggerate.
Solicitations The ABA’s Model Rule 7.3 now states that “a lawyer shall not by in-person, live telephone or real-time electronic contact solicit professional employment from a prospective client when a significant motive for the lawyer’s doing so is the lawyer’s pecuniary gain.” Although not all states have the “real-time” language, it is likely that many states will begin to follow suit on adding this kind of verbiage to their rules. The rule forbids using real-time electronic contact to solicit business directly from a potential client.
Advertisement If you are using LinkedIn for professional purposes, you should operate under the assumption that what you do will be governed by your state’s advertising rules. Some experts assert that if you’re going to put your firm’s name on your LinkedIn page (which most of us would do), your profile has thus immediately become an extension of your firm’s website and now requires a legal disclaimer akin to your website.

I suggest these strategies to help legal professionals avoid ethical snags on LinkedIn:

Use Disclaimers If you are concerned that others might perceive this as a specialization, you can always put a disclaimer in your Summary section, in the Description section of Experience, or even at the bottom of any communication you have within LinkedIn (messages, profile forwarding, introductions, InMails, group comments, etc.). You may want to create a few disclaimers and keep them handy on your desktop for quick cut-and-paste responses.
Testimonials On LinkedIn, you can post testimonials in the form of recommendations. This is great for most professionals, and it makes sense on a professional networking site like LinkedIn. But it’s sticky for lawyers. Testimonials on LinkedIn can be a good thing, as long as you don’t make (or permit others to make) false or misleading statements. Also, don’t participate in an “I-recommend-you, you-recommend-me” game since that could violate Model Rule 7.2 by offering value in exchange for a recommendation. It is important to note that LinkedIn actually plays this game by recommending that you write a testimonial for the person who just wrote one for you. If you truly want to do so, play it safe and wait a few weeks.
Ghost Posting Think twice before someone else “ghost posts” on your behalf. If someone else posts for you, it is arguably misleading because clients might think that you have written the material and are therefore knowledgeable about a particular topic. This approach is tempting, but it could break ethical rules.
Your State’s Ethics Rules If you haven’t read your state’s ethics rules in a while, it’s time for a refresher course. Every state has specific rules about legal marketing and social media. You must take some time to read and become familiar with your specific state’s rules, interpretations, and opinions. Period.
You must comply with the ethical marketing rules for the state in which you have your primary law practice and law office. Also, it is critical to know the rules of any other state that you may be actively soliciting clients or are licensed to practice law. With social media so pervasive and accessible, you must be familiar with the rules in other states, especially if you are intentionally marketing to clients in another state in which you are licensed to practice.

LinkedIn can be an absolutely amazing place to share your knowledge and experience. Not only can you attract clients and clients’ referrals, but it’s also an excellent credentialing tool. As Adrian Lurssen of JD Supra said in a 2011 interview with me: “Potential clients and referring attorneys are looking to Google. When JD Supra members continuously show up in searches because of the content they are sharing across many online mediums like LinkedIn, they become more authoritative.”

For law firm administrators and managing partners reading this, don’t ban LinkedIn for your employees. Social media sites can be great legal advertising tools. Some helpful social media policy and guideline links are available with a quick Internet search. Make sure you are in compliance, and then use this tool for business development and client retention. Final words:

  • Know your state rules.
  • Be honest.
  • Think about the rules before you post anything.
  • Use appropriate disclaimers.
  • Limit “advertising” language.
  • When in doubt, leave it out!
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