Doug Cornelius .com

Kevin O’Keefe of Real Lawyers Have Blogs  put together some key elements to have on your blog: Essential law blog pages needed to promote yourself.

I have read too many blogs, for lawyers and others, that do not tell you what the blog is about or who is writing it. Evey blog (including my blogs) wander a bit. You need to pull together a summary of what you are trying to say and where people can find more information about you.

If you are sitting on blogger like me, don’t use the standard About link. Create a blog post with the information. Backdate it to keep it out of the feed. Here is my about page: About this Blog and Doug Cornelius. To prove its importance, my tracking numbers show the “About” page to be one of the five most visited posts on this blog.

The one thing Kevin left out is a disclaimer. There is still some uncharted territory with blogs. Bar counsel has barely figured out what to do with Web 1.0. You should label your blog as legal advertising and disclaim any possible attorney-client privilege. I have a disclaimer in About this Blog and Doug Cornelius. Over at the Real Estate Space blog, I was more cautious and put a link to the disclaimer in every post. Since lots of blog content is read through RSS feeds, readers may not see the disclaimer.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this policy focused. It is written from an agnostic policy perspective, neither prohibiting nor promoting blogs or social media. I plan to use this as a starting point at the New Company.

When employees create their own blogs, comment on a blog, create a LinkedIn profile, use Facebook and/or contribute to or through any of the other online media (i.e., Wikis, blogs, chat rooms, Internet forums, electronic mailing lists, etc.) they are impacting their personal image and potentially impacting the firm. If your profile online indicates that you work at the firm, then that activity is associated with the firm.

When it comes to expressing opinions about anything having to do with the law, law firm employees are in a special position and have some limitation that other industries do not have. Statements in public forums may inadvertently create an attorney-client relationship, and may also violate the rules prohibiting law firm advertising.

Follow these guidelines when creating and/or publishing legal or non-legal content online:

· Maintain Client Confidentiality. Work for clients and the identities of our clients must be held in confidence to the extent appropriate for that client and client relationship. You must comply with the firm’s Client Confidentiality Policy.

· Be mindful of creating an attorney-client relationship. It is recommended that you not advise any course of action with respect to a particular set of facts. There can be a fine line between supplying legal information and supplying legal advice. Focus on new and interesting things happen in your area of expertise. Be careful asking specific questions.

· Think first. Remember you are publishing in a public forum, so don’t publish anything that you wouldn’t want to be viewed by your family, colleagues or the general public. Since content is easily transferred and replicated across the internet, it is nearly impossible to delete content once it has been published.

· Identify yourself. If you are commenting or publishing on topics related to your job, identify yourself as a lawyer or an employee of the firm. If you are an attorney, you may link to your bio on our public website.

· Disclaimers. You should make it clear that you are expressing views that are your own and not those of the firm.

· Be careful about jeopardizing firm-client relationships. If you are commenting on a legal matter, consider whether the position you take may be adverse or offensive to any of our clients. In case of any doubt, check with the head of the relevant Practice Area.

· Be respectful. Rumors and gossip spread like wildfire on the Internet. Be respectful of your colleagues, the firm, and our competitors.

· Follow the law. This should be obvious. In particular, be cautious of securities law violation and copyright violation. You must be familiar with and comply with the Copyright Policy.

· Use of firm logos or service marks. The firm logo or service mark cannot be used.

· Anonymous Contributions. The same cautions and restrictions on communications apply to supposedly “anonymous” blogs, comments, posts or other content. There almost nothing is truly anonymous on the internet. You should not use anonymity as a shield for malicious or wrongful content.

Blogs

• Registration: If you have a blog that is related to your job (for example a lawyer with a law-related blog), it must be registered with ______. 
• Media: Media inquiries related to your blog should be handled like any other media inquiry.
• Disclaimer: There should be a prominent disclaimer or link to a disclaimer on the main page, as well as in the “About” portion of your blog. See _______ for an appropriate disclaimer.
• Name of Blog: Neither the title of the blog nor the URL of the blog may include the firm name.
• Comments: Bloggers may allow others to comment on their posts. Comments may be attributable to the blogger so you should be prepared to moderate comments and delete offensive comments.
• Content: Do you have questions about what is appropriate to discuss on your blog? Ask the head of your Practice Area or the head of the relevant Practice Area.

Commenting on Blogs

You should treat the comments you make on another blog the same as you would treat posts on your own blog

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a powerful professional online networking tool. For attorneys, LinkedIn is a relatively new tool and state bar regulators have not ruled on what is appropriate.

• Avoid answering legal questions. It is very easy to inadvertently create an attorney-client relationship. The line between supplying legal information and legal advice is very gray.
•  Recommendations are particularly problematic. In some jurisdictions they can be viewed as testimonials and attorney advertising. Attorneys should avoid providing recommendations to other attorneys for that reason. If you receive a recommendation, please have it promptly reviewed by ________. Non-attorney staff members may recommend other non-attorneys if they otherwise comply with the above guidelines.

Facebook/MySpace/Other Social Network Sites

Although these are largely social tools, if you are a member of the firm’s network or list the firm in your work information then your activity in these types of sites impacts the firm as well as your personal image. The guidelines are applicable to your use of these sites.

Legal OnRamp

This site is a knowledge platform for attorneys matched with some features of social networking sites. Unlike some other online sites, this one is well-populated with in-house counsel of clients and potential clients. Please contact _____ with any questions about the use of this site.

Wikipedia

Any edits you make to wikipedia while using a firm computer can potentially be tied back to the firm. Even an anonymous edit marks the editor with its Internet Protocol address. This IP address can easily be tied back to the firm.

Twitter

Twitter is a type of blogging, limited to 140 characters per post.

I had the pleasure of hosting a lunch meeting for the International Legal Technology Association to talk about Social Networking for Lawyers and Legal IT.

I was joined by Jenn Steele and Bob Ambrogi in talking about Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, Twitter, Legal OnRamp and Martindale Connected. We looked at the ways we each use these tools and how the audience used the tools. We also talked a bit about policy and rules for using these sites.

Here is the slide deck we used. You can also get the slides with our notes on JD Supra: Social Networking for Lawyers and Legal IT.

(We deleted the slides on LegalOnRamp and Martindale Connected because we “borrowed” them from another presentation.)

Jenn Steele is the Director of Information Technology at Morrison Mahoney LLP.  She holds an MBA from the Simmons School of Management and a B.S. in Biology from MIT, with a minor in Expository Writing.  Prior to Morrison Mahoney, she was the Director of Information Technology at Donovan Hatem LLP from 2002-2007, and the Senior Applications Specialist at Burns & Levinson LLP from 2000-2002.  She has also held positions in the health and human services industry.  She is the author of Leading Geeks, a blog focusing on best practices for leading technologists (www.leadinggeeks.blogspot.com).

Robert Ambrogi is an internationally known legal journalist and a leading authority on law and the Web.  He represents clients at the intersection of law, media and technology and is also established professional in alternative dispute resolution.  Robert is a Massachusetts lawyer, writer and media consultant and is author of the book, The Essential Guide to the Best (and Worst) Legal Sites on the Web.  He also writes the blog Media Law, co-writes Legal Blog Watch and cohosts the legal affairs podcast Lawyer2Lawyer.

For those of you wondering if blogging is a real activity or whether blogging is worthwhile, you should checkout Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere. They are tracking over 133 million blogs and almost one million blog posts every 24 hours.

Being the first or one of just a few bloggers inside your organization can put you in an influential position. Scott Gavin put together five reasons why in his First Mover Advantage article:

1. Senior management will want to know who you are and what you are saying. Are you a threat or an innovative individual who’s willing to share his thoughts in a public forum?
2. The first blog is like a when a new kid starts school. People want to know who you are, what you are like and what you have to say. Whether they take to you after this is another matter and is up to you.
3. It can feel like a new era has dawned on your company. This is especially true if the blog originates outside of a technical IT line. Such a simple thing as a blog can make people feel like the company is moving with the times both culturally and technically.
4. You are doing something new that others wish they had the courage to do, so they’ll take notice and champion your efforts.
5. You’ll be seen as a risk talker and innovator. In many companies this is a good thing.

. . .
I’m not saying any old Joe can achieve great things just by blogging. However if you really are great, and have great ideas and interesting things to say, then step up and get noticed.

If your firm has an internal blogging platform, jump on board and start writing.  It is good for your career to think about your job for a few minutes a day and write down a few of those thoughts.

If your firm does not have an internal blogging platform, set up an external blog.  It only takes a minute to set one up using a hosted blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress. (Of course check to see if your firm has a blogging/internet/social media policy and make sure you comply with it.)

Wilmer Hale has launched four associate blogs as part of the firm’s Wilmer Hale Careers website.

• Julie Smolinski from the Palo Alto office and is a member of the Transactional Department, Corporate Practice Group
• Ross Firsenbaum from the New York office and is a member of the Litigation/Controversy Department.
• Anne McLaughlin from the Boston office and is a member of the Litigation/Controversy Department.
• Kevin Chambers from the Washington office and is a member of the Securities Department, Securities Litigation and Enforcement Practice Group.

Although Lisa van der Pool was dismissive of the blogs in the Boston Business Journal (Blog Fog subscribers only), I liked the use of blogs as a recruiting tool.  They give some insight into the lives of these associates and, by proxy, into the life of an associate at WilmerHale.  Sure it may be a sanitized view, showing everything is great. But it is still a view that will appeal to recruits. It certainly gives a recruit plenty to talk about if they get to interview with any of these four bloggers.

We had a great crowd at my presentation on Establishing the Digital Relationship, along with Tim Parker and Yuval Zukerman. It looks like some of the audience really understood the message. 

Bob Buday of The Bloom Group, who set up the presentation, ran off and set up his own blog the next day: Thought Leadership Space. Here are his posts so far:

• Why Display Ads Should Display Expertise
• Can You Give Away Too Many Thoughts? 
• Horse Before the Cart 
• The lightbulb goes on! 

Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM has been thinking about the concept of mandatory blogging for a while:

• What Have You Learned?
• Unsociable Uses of Social Media
• Knowledge Management Made Mandatory?
• Knowledge Management Made Easier

Mary seems to have moved beyond the concept of mandatory blogging to encouraged blogging.

Now that is a concept I can get behind.

Blogging is not for everyone. It is a new way of thinking and a new way of capturing information. The key is to show people the positive benefits of using this new way to communicate and capture knowledge.

We need to lead by example. We need to show the positive success stories of blog within an enterprise.

Here at The Firm, we just launched our third internal blog this week. I am already starting to see to some positive results.

After my post Make Blogging Mandatory for Knowledge Management, there has been a continuing flurry of thoughts about mandatory blogging floating around:

• Knowledge Management Made Mandatory? from Mary Abraham
• Going with the flow from Mark Gould
• Blogging Mandatory Or Voluntary? from Mike Gotta
• Unsocialable Uses of Social Media from Mary Abraham

When Jack Vinson made his knowledge management start blogging he used the term flogging.

I think that is how most people would interpret forced blogging.

Forced blogging would just be another bad KM system that is poorly populated with content and outside the flow of most people’s work.

That being said, there are situations where blogging can be mandatory. If the team decides to manage a project through a blog (or wiki) then the team can decide to make blogging mandatory. In that case, the blog post is replacement for email. The team blog is not asking people to take the extra step of crafting a blog post. You are merely asking them to change the way the team communicates. You are just changing the process, not adding to it.

As Michael Idinopulos coined the phrase you are putting blogging “in the flow, not above the flow.”

You are not asking people to take individual positions in individual blogs. You are asking them to contribute to the flow of information for a particular project or case. You are merely replacing email communication with blog communication. That is a great idea.

At my panel on What Blogging Brings To Business at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, there was some discussion about whether a company should make blogging mandatory. I sense the audience and the panel thought it was a bad idea.

Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM calls it Knowledge Management Made Easier and points to a story by Tim Leberecht:  The Writing Organization: Knowledge Management Made Easy. Mary seems to think mandatory blogging would be a good idea.

Dave Snowden points to a blog post from Stephen Holt [Mandatory employee blogs: one way to boost knowledge] which seeks to make blogging mandatory as a means of making tacit knowledge explicit. Dave’s reaction:

“Aside from the perpetuation of the myth of tacit-explicit knowledge conversion (more on this tomorrow), the idea of compulsion flies in the face of all theory and practice in social computing.  Its a classic; find something which is working, then ruin it by compulsion.”

I am in Dave Snowden’s camp. I think mandatory blogging is a bad idea.

After reading Groundswell this weekend, the nature of participation in social media became more clear. Not everyone is a “creator” (as the authors of Groundswell would label them). If you are a blogger, you are a “creator.”

Blogging is about consuming and commenting as much as it is about posting. I encourage people to become part of the conversation of social media. I read hundreds of blog posts for every post that I write. I make comments on others blogs.

One of  the powers of blogging (writing them, reading them and commenting on them) is that it reduces thoughts and knowledge to a place where they become findable.  That is great for knowledge management.

But there are lots of other ways to communicate using social media other than blogging.  These social media tools are also great for knowledge management.  The better move is to encourage communication through the platform communication tools of social media.  These web-based communication tools make it much easier to find the content than email based communication.

I would prefer that someone on  my client team update the wiki page for the client’s matter more than that that person putting up a post on their own blog. I would prefer someone tagging a document as a good precedent. I would prefer someone commenting on one of my blog posts to point out an alternative approach.

The key is to realize that you can communicate with the web and that communication on the web can be better leveraged to capture knowledge and leverage it for reuse.