The Law Meets Twitter (in America, at least)

July 1, 2009

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Debate about Twitter’s effectiveness as a marketing tool for lawyers continues across the pond, with this post from Legal Blog Watch summarising where things stand in the Twitter law wars. In the red corner, Larry Bodine, who isn’t keen on Twitter, while in the blue is Adrian Dayton, who found a client and a book deal thanks to Twitter. Erring towards the Bodine camp is Tom McClain, who has written of his reasons for departing Twitter.

In a nutshell, McClain is bidding farewell because Twitter takes up too much time. He cites Bodine and says: “I had allowed Twitter to become a ‘powerful distraction from getting real marketing work done.’ I need to create more time to focus on face-to-face marketing and blogging.”

What strikes us as salient in all this is not so much the pros and cons about Twitter but the ease with which McClain blends the terms ‘face-to-face marketing’ and ‘blogging’. Evidently, for this American lawyer – and a great many others – the two are joined at the hip.

But here in the UK, law firms continue to display hesitancy about hosting their own blogs. Why is this, and when will things change? Are we really such conservatives? How many in the UK legal profession would agree with McClain’s comment that “the day is probably coming when a lawyer who has no presence in social networking will be viewed as somehow irrelevant in much the same way as we currently feel about law firms with no webpage”?

Thomas McClain (pictured) is an attorney with Atlanta law firm Chorey, Taylor & Feil.

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.