This is the slide deck from our final online session in Social Media in Law Practice, part of the Univ. of Dayton School of Law Digital Lawyering Program. It covers time management, the future of social media, its application to the legal profession, and our deliverable for the session.
The students were asked to create a social media policy for a law practice to prove competency in the subject matter. In the course, we covered blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Twitter as the core platforms, reviewed management and analytic tools, privacy and security settings, ethics rules and opinions, use of social media in litigation, integration with a larger online marketing strategy, and more.
In order to teach this session I was forced to go back through all of my own personal and professional uses of social media which was a daunting task at times. I gave the students walkthroughs of the different applications, privacy and account settings, and other features using my own accounts, excluding any confidential or private information. I refered to several practical books from the ABA LPM’s ____in One Hour for Lawyer’s Series for each social media method as well as Niki Black and Carolyn Elefant’s book, Social Media for Lawyers. We also looked across industries to see how other professions and businesses are using social media for client development and professional networking.
Several interesting questions were raised by the students regarding their transition from student to licensed lawyer and how this should be handled in their existing social media use. For example, upon passing the bar, should they notify friends and family that going forward their use of these applications will be x, or should they post a one-time disclaimer reminding followers that now that they are licensed lawyers, friends should not post any confidential legal questions on public sites? These are real concerns for young lawyers. Hopefully this session provided them with the skills they need to navigate, keep up with, and regularly modify their use of social media in their careers.