On one hand, extolling the virtues of Twitter to the legal community can be exhausting, awkward work. On the other hand, it makes people look at you funny. Especially lawyers.

Not all, of course, since a few lawyers are active on Twitter (see www.lawtweet.ca ). But so many look down their nose at Twitter, it really needs help acquitting itself in the eyes of most professionals.

A small poll we conducted last year of 85 lawyers in BC revealed fully 20% of lawyers felt social networks (Twitter and Facebook specifically) were “trivial or inappropriate” in the legal context and a further 50% thought them “of uncertain utility”. 10% simply didn’t know what they felt. Of the remaining 20% most thought social networks were “useful in the right context” and only three respondents characterized them as “indispensible” in the legal context.

Does this mean lawyers are more dismissive of Twitter than other professions are? I’m not sure, and it all may have started as healthy skepticism, at least at first. The last to adopt are the last to be influenced, right? But even as the popular social networking service has grown, reporting 100 million active users last September, with political leaders, non-profits and reporters chief among them, lawyers are hardly clamoring to join in. Law librarian Connie Crosby shared some statistics yesterday indicating 13.7% of Canadians are active Twitter users. I don’t have stats for Canadian lawyers, but it appears from the 2011 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report (some information is reproduced here ) that only 6% of individual lawyers in the US are using Twitter.

Of course, Twitter itself is largely to blame, having earned its early reputation as the preferred domain of the bored and the boring with the platitudinous call to action, “What are you doing?” But the service switched the question to “What’s happening?” over two years ago, so shouldn’t that have changed things? Wrote one commentator on social media news site Mashable: 

“The change acknowledges that Twitter has grown far beyond the more personal status updates it was originally envisioned to convey, and has morphed into a sort of always-on, source-agnostic information network that is wholly unique.”

But the stigma of Twitter’s past isn’t so easily erased, causing some to question why. To borrow the words of Canadian legal pundit Jordan Furlong, from “How to use new media to access old media” published in the CBA Solo and Small Firm Handbook:

“I think we can now dispense with the tired jokes that Twitter is for telling people what your cat is doing or what you had for lunch. Twitter is an extraordinary personal branding and communication platform, one through which you can show off expertise, curate specialized knowledge, build subscriber bases, and strike up valuable networking relationships. Twitter is ‘headline news’ for the internet, and reporters are coming to rely heavily upon it.”

As Twitter matures beyond its juvenile phase, it’s making its presence felt in decidedly more somber and serious ways. Twitter's influence on the Arab Spring and other episodes of civil unrest come to mind to be sure, but it is making an impression in more orderly domestic legal and political contexts too, namely:

• Twitter’s remarkable impact on the Canada Elections Act ban against posting early election results, which the government now claims to have abandoned,
• Tony Clement’s Open Government Consultation efforts using Twitter hashtag #opengovchat,
• Twitter’s increasingly credited ability to help launch news stories (e.g. the Attawapiskat crisis as explained by CLE BC’s Susan Munro in her blog post on Slaw)
• Twitter’s very broad uptake by Canadian politicians (who can be tracked in numerous ways on www.politwitter.ca).

Whether or not Twitter will create a larger role for itself in the legal profession is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, however, Courthouse Libraries BC is experimenting with getting the bird to work in ways that may assist lawyers to get more out of the free service.

Twitter @theCLBC

At Courthouse Libraries BC we’ve been experimenting with Twitter for about a year, finding out how we can effectively help lawyers share and organize legal news and commentary on Twitter and online. Our Twitter Guide explains how we use it in our Practice Portals (specialized practice-specific sections of our website), some Twitter hashtags we’ve coined (such as #clbcFAM or #clbcPI) to help find, organize and share tweets on particular subjects, and our use of Twitter lists.

@theCLBC is Courthouse Libraries BC’s primary account, posting legal news, CPD opportunities, internal activities, notable legal information resources, etc. We also administer @BClex as an automated “news feed” account that mostly tweets notifications about external legal blogs of relevance to local lawyers.

Practice Portal Twitter boxes and #clbc hashtags

Visit any of our Practice Portals and you will see a Twitter box near the bottom, drawing in any tweets that use the hashtag corresponding to that practice area. These hashtags correspond as follows:

• #clbcFAM for family law topics
• #clbcLIT for civil litigation topics
• #clbcPI for personal injury topics
• #clbcPM for practice management topics
• #clbcWE for wills and estates topics

In principle, it need not matter which hashtag describes a subject, so long as it is consistent, concise, unique, and descriptive. At the 140 character limit, #bcpersonalinjurylaw is too verbose. For the sake of convenience we’ve adopted #clbc to prepend to short acronyms for areas of practice. It’s early days yet, and other hashtags than our own could just as easily be employed, but one of the ways to curate specialized legal knowledge is to just start tagging. Only a few tags are presently used for BC legal tweets at all, #bclegal for example which suffers from being very broad in scope.

Some benefits we hope to see from channeling Twitter through our Practice Portals include:

1. Open exchange—Anyone with information or questions regarding a practice area can include a hashtag in a tweet for it to appear in the relevant Practice Portal. This may be one way to quickly share information with others without needing to belong to a listserv or other restricted group.
2. Timely information—Reporters realize Twitter is a much faster way to get the news out than almost any other medium. Faster than the radio journalist calls in a story, other reporters quickly tweet the results of press conferences and court rulings. Similarly, the day BC’s new Wills Estate and Succession Act or the Family Law Act is brought into force, many will find out through Twitter before any other means. Adopting some standard hashtags will make such announcements easier to find for those interested.
3. Reach beyond Twitter—You don’t actually need to subscribe to Twitter to get something from it. Embedding tweets in our website (which currently has about 10,000 visitors per month) expands the reach of Twitter posts to a readership that includes lawyers who never use Twitter. For those posting, this extra reach is gained without any greater effort than employing a hashtag.
4. Archive of Practice-Related Tweets—At present, Twitter itself won’t let you search for Twitter posts older than ten days. We now archive tweets that have used a #clbc hashtag so that this information is not lost.

@theCLBC Twitter Lists

Counterintuitive though it may seem in the Google age, it’s not always easy to locate other lawyers in your practice area on Twitter who use it to discuss and share legal news. For a growing directory of BC-based legal professionals who use Twitter a) primarily for professional purposes, and b) who post on a particular practice area mostly, @theCLBC’s Twitter lists are worth exploring. If you or someone you know fits the above criteria, please feel free to tell @theCLBC (or email me, nrussell@courthouselibrary.ca).

Twitter lists are one of the newer, more useful, yet underused Twitter features. You can follow hundreds (even thousands) of Twitter accounts in theory, but to have any hope of filtering out the resulting chatter, many Twitter users only “listen” to select accounts. You do this using Twitter lists. As we improve our lists of existing legal Twitter profiles, I will post more on this.

An always-on, source-agnostic information network through which you can show off expertise, and curate specialized knowledge within a legal context

That’s a mouthful, admittedly, but it captures the essence of how Twitter can, independent from its application as a marketing tool, be used to assist lawyers. We would like to back up Jordan Furlong’s assertion that Twitter is indeed an effective way to curate specialized legal knowledge, and we look forward to seeing whether any of the above initiatives take root.

Of course, we’re hardly alone in this. Some other interesting experiments by professional legal organizations and individuals bear close watching. CLE BC some time ago adopted a Twitter Guide explaining how to use hashtags at CPD programs and courses. And by far the most creative uses I’ve heard yet is a moot via Twitter to be hosted by West Coast Environmental Law on February 21st, 2012, at 10am (PST).

According to Andrew Gage, Staff Counsel and Liaison Lawyer at WCEL, since oral argument in moots is always in real time, Twitter is not so odd a fit for a law moot as you might think. Participants such as judges, clerks and counsel will be added to an official Twitter list, so those who wish can follow only the mooters without crosstalk. Participants will type away and send tweets at about the same pace they would if they were on their feet delivering argument in person. Alternatively, to hear the peanut gallery, just follow the hashtag rather than the list, and you will see both participants’ comments and those of whoever else cares to chime in.

Last I spoke with Andrew they were still looking for that third judge. As of right now it appears there’s still an opening. Any interest in being one of the first Twitter-exclusive judges?