The legal profession has shifted its focus from trying to control social media to working out how to carefully reap its benefits. Leanne Mezrani reports.

Social media is a young, fickle and sometimes aggressive beast.

Even though Facebook has more than a billion monthly active users, and Twitter boasts an active following of around 200 million, both sites are less than a decade old. Then you have even younger entrants to the social media scene, like Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest ... the list goes on.

With youth comes the inevitable, often uncomfortable, developmental years. Social media sites are regularly adding new features or making refinements that have both delighted and infuriated users. Facebook, it seems, is responsible for the greatest amount of user frustration, earning itself a Wikipedia page entitled Criticism of Facebook.

These growing pains are not, however, causing nearly as much anxiety among lawyers as the threat that they will have to master yet another social media channel. Investing numerous, potentially billable hours to be trained in one site, only to be informed that it has been superseded by a new-and-improved alternative can test even the most entrepreneurial lawyer.

Then, in 2012, something interesting happened that promised a slowdown in the stream of new entrants into the social media space: funding of consumer sites and mobile companies declined by 42 per cent compared to 2011, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource.

Fred Wilson, a US-based venture capitalist who invested in Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare, blogged that large platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, are starting to “suck up a lot of the oxygen”.

“Consumer behaviours are starting to ossify on the web and it is harder than ever to build a large audience from a standing start,” he writes.

So, as social media moves ever so slightly towards consolidation, it brings a glimmer of hope that the social beast may one day be tamed.

Is that a sigh of relief coming from the legal profession?

Confidence in social media technologies among legal professionals is already improving. Most lawyers and firms have some form of online presence, and around 75 per cent of firms in Australia use social media in a professional capacity, according to a recent Thomson Reuters survey.

The survey also found that 61 per cent of firms have a strategy in place to cover social media use, and 39 per cent of firms are providing social media training for staff.

There is still, however, one major obstacle to the widespread uptake of social media in the legal profession, according to Vivienne Storey, marketing and business development manager at Rockwell Olivier, that is: the billable hour.

Twelve months into the role at Rockwell Olivier, Storey has found that her greatest challenge as the firm’s social media strategist is convincing lawyers to invest potentially billable time into online chatter.

“The lawyers’ biggest concern is time, not what to post,” she said. “You have to demonstrate that social media is worth doing.”

Storey says the champions of social media at Rockwell Olivier are lawyers who recognise its potential to attract and retain clients, improve brand awareness and provide networking opportunities.

Interestingly, she adds, “the converted” are not always from the tech-savvy younger generation. In fact, Nielsen research found that people over the age of 55 are the fastest-growing group joining Facebook.

“It is not specific to age or service area,” Storey says, revealing that Rockwell Olivier’s managing principal in Sydney, Peter Bobbin, is one of the firm’s most regular tweeters.

The right fit for law

Storey was the general manager at BlandsLaw, a Sydney-based employment law boutique that touts expertise in developing social media policies, before taking the role at Rockwell Olivier. She has also worked with a number of global corporates, including Deutsche Bank, ING Bank, Nestle, Phillip Morris and Deloitte.

In her experience, Storey says, she has found that while social media is an essential communications channel in any business’ marketing plan, each industry requires a tailored solution.

Law is no exception, she adds.

That is why she is currently devoting a lot of energy to rolling out training for Rockwell Olivier staff on how to use LinkedIn and Twitter – two channels chosen specifically for their suitability to the legal profession.

LinkedIn was selected as the starting point due to its “professional nature”, she explains, while Twitter is proving popular among the firm’s lawyers and clients alike.

Her approach is supported by the findings of the Thomson Reuters survey, in which firms named LinkedIn and Twitter as the most acceptable social networks to use professionally.

Rockwell Olivier now has three Twitter handles: Argyle Private by Rockwell Olivier, which targets referrers to the firm’s private client practice, such as accountants and financial advisers; one that has an international flavour to support the firm’s Pacific Legal Network arm, and a general Rockwell Olivier account.

The themed handles have a more engaged audience, reveals Storey, mostly due to the targeted and relevant information they provide. This avoids Twitter followers having to trawl through a general firm feed for tweets that apply to them, she adds.

Her conclusion appears to be a logical one given the millions of online micro-communities, driven by individuals engaged around social groups, friends, subjects, topics, interests, issues, brands and products.

This deep engagement has taken the focus away from “broadcasting” to “interaction”, says Storey.

“Engagement is the key,” she continues, claiming that a successful social media strategy is measured by the quality not quantity of interaction, such as audience participation via retweets of comments.

Same but different

Global firm Allens is also focusing its social media efforts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The firm’s Twitter feed has the highest number of followers of any large Australian firm, with around 3900 followers.

Senior corporate affairs manager at Allens, Jason Silverii, credits consistent and targeted tweeting over the past four or so years for the impressive following.

A highly-engaged group that Allens has captured in its social net is graduates, he reveals.

“Twitter is excellent for engaging law graduates ... we will tweet information on clerkships because we know we have a high number of law students who follow our Twitter feed.”

Allens also boasts around 3350 LinkedIn members. The LinkedIn page has a “business bent”, explains Silverii, which is comfortable terrain for legal professionals.

It may take convincing, however, to get the firm’s lawyers onto other platforms. Silverii reveals that his team has only dabbled in YouTube and Pinterest, both of which are yet to gain a strong firm following. He points out, however, that Allens has developed an enthusiastic alumni following on its Facebook page.

“The Facebook site is targeted directly at our alumni ... [it] can be a good way of keeping our alumni up-to-date with what’s happening around the firm,” he says.

Silverii adds, however, that the risks of social media use outstrip the potential benefits. Storey disagrees, claiming the opposite is true. Somewhere in the middle sits Ari Kaplan, a leading legal and technology consultant, who claims that law firms should at least dip their toes into the social media waters.

A lawyer for nine years from 1997 to 2006, Kaplan champions the adoption of social media by law firms to help “understand what concerns your clients are engaged in and what issues are most important to your clients”.

However, he also said the adoption or expansion of social media forums should be done in an “organic fashion”.

“I work on an incremental innovation theme,” he told Lawyers Weekly in September. “I want individuals and organisations to take very small and targeted steps towards learning about social media.”

Storey, on the other hand, claims that there is nothing to fear as long as lawyers “take appropriate offline behaviour online”. She encourages Rockwell Olivier staff to tweet, blog and post their own content.

“It’s a social interaction and it comes back to authenticity,” she says, warning that being too cautious and putting too strong a filter on lawyers’ social voice can dilute their message.

That said, Storey gives the lawyers at Rockwell Olivier plenty of direction, including advice on tone. She promotes, for example, the use of informal language, rather than lawyer speak, on social media channels.

The Allens camp is more concerned about consistency of voice.

“You need to ... be clear on the audience you want to reach and be clear how you are going to do this,” says Silverii.

Meanwhile, there are employees at some firms who aren’t even given the option of engaging on social media for professional purposes.

A poll conducted by Lawyers Weekly last year revealed that 27 per cent of lawyers were forbidden from accessing social media at work; while 19 per cent were not encouraged to access it and 13 per cent were only allowed to access certain social media sites.

The majority (40%), however, were allowed and encouraged to use social media across all platforms.

One thing Storey and Silverii do agree on is the importance of lawyers and law firms having some form of social media presence.

“There are conversations happening constantly that include your clients, prospective clients and competitors [and] social media is one way you can be a part of that conversation,” says Silverii.

Storey more enthusiastically comments: “Lawyers are witty and interesting ... showcase it!”