Dear Associate at a Biglaw Firm: I am the legal recruiter to whom you were introduced in a recent post on Above the Law. I am hoping we can connect regarding our shared interest in maximizing your use of LinkedIn…

Not sure how to respond? I understand your hesitation, both to accept my LinkedIn invitation and to waste spend any more billable time on social media. After all, you signed up for the site, posted a professional picture, edited your headline so that it no longer reads “Name, Title, at Employer,” and fleshed out your profile. And what came of it?!? Probably nothing. That may be because there are three building blocks of LinkedIn: Profiles, Connection, and Participation, and, according to LinkedIn in One Hour for Lawyers authors Dennis Kennedy and Allison Shields, lawyers are often completely unaware of at least one of those three key features. Digital media strategist Helen Pitlik observes on flipthemedia.com that “[m]any lawyers don’t use social media because they don’t think they can get clients from online activity.” Other lawyers “start using social media thinking that this will attract clients, and give up because it doesn’t,” Pitlick concludes in her article, Why Don’t Lawyers Use Social Media. “Traditional law firm marketing is designed to increase business, and this runs counter to the information- and relationship-based principles of social media.”

Nonetheless, Greentarget’s 2014 State of Digital & Content Marketing Survey of in-house counsel and law firm CMOs found LinkedIn to be the social network perceived to have the most professional relevance for lawyers. Moreover, Greentarget reported, “LinkedIn continues to be viewed as the ‘serious’ social network among in-house lawyers, generating the most use for professional reasons.” Why is it so popular? The reason is that second building block Kennedy and Shields mentioned: Connection. LinkedIn’s core value proposition, Linked Intelligence points out, is its ability to answer the question, “Who do I know who knows somebody who…?” That is consistent with Greentarget’s finding that nearly half of in-house counsel “envision a future in which the diversity of a lawyer’s engagement on LinkedIn — number of connections, participation in groups, use as a vehicle for distributing quality content — will play an important role in influencing clients to hire that lawyer.” Before LinkedIn, Linked Intelligence notes, an in-house counsel looking for a referral would either: (a) ask the people in his network most likely to know outside counsel with that specialty (although he may still miss the best candidate “because so often those connections aren’t necessarily obvious”); or (b) contact everybody he knows, which would quickly wear thin, since the same 1% usually responded.

Read original article


Tags: