Social Networking & Law Firms

What is the value of online social networking to law firms? What are the risks in allowing access, or disallowing access amongst team members?

These are a few of the questions we've been discussing lately at CGW.

It's rare these days to open a newspaper or magazine without some reference to Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace & a host of other online networking tools. Whether the article bemoans wasted productivity on Facebook or welcomes the tools a facility like LinkedIn provides, it's at the forefront of our social conciousness.

There are two sides to the social networking issue, the first is on the people side - if our team members want to communicate with their friends and colleagues online using tools like MySpace and this is important to them, shouldn't we allow this? We think so, but we realise it is also important to ensure that the business is protected. So we allow access to sites during lunch times and before and after work. We have a CGW group on Facebook and we encourage current team members and Alumni to join up. It allows us to learn a little bit more about the people we work with.

On the other side is how we can use social networking to actually promote our firm. Marketing is hard work and online tools like LinkedIn make it that little bit easier to manage our contacts.

Social networks are just another tool we use as people to communicate with one another. In a business that's all about relationships, that can only be a good thing.