Kevin O’Keefe is always on the hunt for the next big thing, and what to do about it. His latest creation is Lextweet, billed as means to “follow legal community members who use Twitter to discuss the law and much more.” As Kevin is thrilled to say, the Lextweet community has grown enormously in the few weeks it’s been in existence, both by people chosing to join and Kevin’s inclusion of known members of the community to get the ball rolling. And rolling it is.
Being one of those highly ambivalent twitterers, Lextweet seemed to offer a valuable service, a way to see what other lawyers were twitting about without having to follow them, and thus suffer the crash of a zillion twits in order to check out the handful that I cared to receive. It was a matter of both time and interest, and Lextweet provided a mechanism to check out the broader legal twittersphere without commitment.
Though still a work in progress, Lextweet seems to do exactly what it should. Pull it up and there we are, lawyer twits galore. Twits from lawyers I don’t know, never heard of, recognize, care about. Twits about lawyer’s aunt’s midlife crises. Twits about lawyer’s lunch meat. Twits about important blog posts and breaking news. Twits, twits and more twits.
Indeed, if you look at the sidebar, you see that twitterers are judges by the number of their followers. Yet another affection of keeping score by irrelevant numbers, but one that permeates the blawgosphere as well as twitter, so hardly surprising. I don’t think this is a good measure of twitter success, but the numbers show that tends of thousand of people disagree with me and desperately want to “win” the game by accumulating followers. Whatever turns them on.
There are some issues, naturally. The “legal community” is not, as some would expect, limited to lawyers. There are those who live in the ancillary world, whether interested in the law, involved in the law or marketing to the law. If you think this is the twitter version of a lawyer listserv, you will be disappointed. It’s full of non-lawyer stuff, which is no doubt why Kevin included the “and much more” language. But then, the is a forum for twits by the legal community, not vetted by legal content and interest. Kevin provides the mechanism, and we provide the twits.
Another problem is that it doesn’t update automatically, though it would seem that if it did the twits would whiz by so quickly that it would all appear a blur. On the other hand, when you refresh the page to see what’s new, the original top post may end up on page 3, making it a lot of work to keep abreast. Again, a problem, but unlikely to be one that is solvable by Kevin, since he doesn’t control how many twits per second come out of the legal community.
But the biggest issue has nothing to do with Lextweet at all. The vast majority of twits are, how do I say this nicely, worthless to the general lawyer audience. Nothing personal, but intimate details of your personal hygiene don’t interest me. I don’t know your family (I don’t even know you) so it’s really of little concern what they’re having for breakfast. But this is what people twit about, and what shows up on Lextweet whether it matters or not.
There’s no fault to be placed for the fact that lawyers twit about ordinary stuff along with the legal stuff. It’s their twitter too, and they can twit about anything they want. But since it’s getting picked up on Lextweet, and disseminated to the broader audience of the legal community, it creates a huge clutter for those who are looking for twits of legal interest, and may give the false appearance that some lawyer, who’s minding their own business having a nice twitter chat with a friend, is having that chat rebroadcast to the nationwide legal community. This likely isn’t what they had in mind when discussing their favorite brand of baby formula. And they are allowed to discuss that without having to explain the issue to lawyers nationwide.
Finally, there’s one additional piece that was striking about Lextweet. Some lawyers who are twitting about legal topics, and most often by twitting a link or retwitting a post, should consider that their twits on Lextweet shoot far beyond their list of followers, to an array of lawyers they don’t know and who don’t know them. Reputations are built and destroyed based on impressions, and impressions are made by what you think is content worth distributing. If you twit that something is “great”, and it’s grossly simplistic, wrong, old and obvious, whatever, then you’ve just branded yourself to a swathe of lawyers as a dolt.
Some, perhaps many, twit rather mindlessly, apparently believing that it’s better to be a constant twitterer than to be selective about your twits. I think most of us can blow past the baby formula posts without it influencing our ideas about someone, but it’s a lot harder to ignore a substantive twit that shows you’re anything but substantive. Of course, this is a truism, so should come as no surprise.
All in all, I think Kevin’s got a winner here, in that it provides a huge service that alleviates the pressure to follow a bunch of people you don’t know and likely would clog up the twitterworks. Now if there was a way to effectively filter the non-legal and marketing pieces out, so that we can choose to see the lawyer twits and let people have their baby formula twitversations in private, Lextweet would be a killer.
To the extent that Lextweet has issues, it’s not so much a reflection of Lextweet, but a reflection of us. If you want to enjoy lawyerly twittering, then twit like a lawyer. If you want to twit about lunch meat, don’t complain that others do so as well.
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A far better state of the union on LexTweet than I could author Scott. I don’t think I could disagree with a word. A lot of lawyer tweets, some relevant, some not. I expect once we narrow the focus with groups and highlight some of the contributions a little more will come to light.
Scott: agree with most of what you say (esp re exhibitionist tweets), but how do you define “lawyer tweets”? I’m not a lawyer, but hope that my tweets / RTs on legal BD, marketing, management, etc., are on a higher level than baby formula twitversations (ditto for my non-legal tweets). I try to add value to the legal community conversation not by clarifying points of law but by helping lawyers be successful. I certainly appreciate that you may not see value in that, but should I and others like me not be part of LexTweet? Do lawyers need another listserv? Don’t get me wrong – I fully agree that filtering is necessary for LexTweet or it will become irrelevant. The challenge for Kevin is to introduce filtering without changing LexTweet completely.
Just my observations at this stage. I don’t know if or how it will develop, or whether there are techno stuff to be done that can improve delivery or separate wheat from chafe, but for such a new idea, it really seems to fill a niche.
I agree with you that there should be a place in this for lawyers who want and seek marketing advice. Even though it’s not my thing, it’s certainly something that many are interested in and there needs to be a Lextweet group for that purpose. I also see nothing wrong with anybody who wants to twit about baby formula. Just because we’re lawyers doesn’t mean we don’t have lives or interests aside from the law. Again, nothing wrong with it at all, but it would be helpful for Lextweet purposes to filter out the personal conversations from the legal.
As for your question of how to define “lawyer tweets,” that’s difficult. For me, it would be tweets on legal topics. Not the personal stuff or the marketing stuff, which is a subset of lawyer tweets, but not directly related to law. I’m sure that many would want a broader definition and want to get both legal issues and lawyer marketing issues at the same time. I believe it’s important to distinguish the two, for a variety of reasons, but I don’t advocate that lawyer marketing be excluded or ignored. I just ask that it be kept separate from legal topics, and that there be recognition that all lawyers aren’t all about marketing.
But your point that this will get overwhelming, and thus irrelevant, if it isn’t made manageable is a good one. Whatever Kevin comes up with, someone will probably disagree, but lawyers will never be entirely of one mind about what should be in and out. At least lextweet makes it possible to see what all the lawyers you aren’t following have to say, and that’s certainly better than not being able to do so.
If I were paying or choosing a lawyer — as a firm or a client — I would very much want to know how often he or she interrupts the workday, work flow, work hour to Twitter. An awful lot of lawyers apparently do not have enough work to do and/or are in denial about how distractions (whether from external sources or self-made) degrade efficiency and effectiveness.
We used to have to leave our offices for a coffee or rest room break, or decide to phone or email a specific person, to have our time taken up with talk of lunch meat and hand lotion — or even of layoffs, or courthouse gossip. We used to ask the switchboard to “hold our calls” or only buzz with emergencies when we had serious work that needed concentration. We used to limit our search for soulmates, community, and new business to discrete periods of the day — or, at least, not broadcast to the world that we have nothing very urgent or important to do this morning.
The next time someone asks you whether you [Lex]Tweet, don’t be so sure he or she is trying to connect on a personal or professional level. It could be a way to cull the herd — to find out who comes to work to work rather than to cyber-schmooze.
Are you willing to tell your Managing Partner or your client how many times you wrote, read or forwarded a Tweet today?
When I’m hiring a lawyer, I’m looking for someone who is not so afraid of their shadow to try innovative ways to learn, share, and network. Twitter does that.
When I’m looking for a lawyer I like one whose content and views are widely cited by thought leaders in their field. Twitter does that.
When I’m looking for a lawyer, I’d like to see what personal interests they may have, are they similar with my own. I like to work with people with similar interests in addition to them being a seasoned pro. Twitter does that.
And if I’m a lawyer, I’m not looking for clients who are so small minded people they would look over their employees shoulder to see what they are doing because they don’t trust them.
Lawyers unafraid to try innovation and to go beyond the status quo will be rewarded with like minded clients – the clients we’d all like to have.
“Down goes Yabut! Down goes Yabut!”
—Howard Cosell
Afraid that every innovation is not an improvement; that every tangent and distraction does not miraculously and serendipitously lead to something valuable; that being thought of as cutting-edge has little to do with serving clients well; and — to make a long story short — that having something more important to do right now means I can’t hang out in your digital playground all afternoon tossing dodging brickbats and constantly checking for mean little canards from Mr. O’K.
Believe it or not, it’s my job to push the envelope, to discover things others may be be skeptical about, and to evangelize about things which I discover that I think are worth a lawyer’s and law firm’s time.
Believe me, I have seen a ton of shit I have never brought up. And when I get questions about that shit, I tell folks to forget it.
Who else is going to play this role, to play in this ‘digital playground’ as you describe it? You expect Thomson Reuters FindLaw, who sponsors the winner of yesterday’s winner on the PGA tour to do it? Hell, with their marketing budget throwing millions around, they wouldn’t know effective Internet marketing and the effective use of social media if it hit them in the face.
You expect LexisNexis and Martindale-Hubbell, which together bill themselves as the leaders in client development for lawyers, to play with this stuff and to tell you what works? Not a chance. They’re too busy preying on law firms too afraid to try something new by selling the firms high priced solutions that don’t offer near the ROI of low cost items discovered in the ‘digital playground.’
You expect individual lawyers and law firms to do it? Forget it. I practiced law for 17 years and know what it feels like to have $30,000 per month in overhead. Who else can go two years without a salary and still be married? Not many lawyers.
Am I too blunt? Probably so. I view the likes of Vince Lombardi, Mike Ditka, and Mark Cuban as mentors and role models. Diplomacy and political correctness are not high on their list of values.
Unfortunately at age 53, with, as my 15 year old describes it, 66% of my life over, I’m probably not going to change much. Hopefully, I can help a few folks in the 34% I have left.
Having initially been quite resistent to twitting, and having come to the painful realization that, ugly as it may be from time to time, it’s for real, I have to side with Kevin on this one. It’s not that the dear Professor’s points are off target. They aren’t, and the time wasted by constantly hearing the stupid twit sound and checking to see if it’s something that matters, only to find that somebody has announced that they are about to leave for lunch, is a problem. It is disruptive. It’s annoying. And it can be fun and grows on you. Fungus-like, but it does.
But what I find particularly persuasive is that Kevin’s job is to figure out what the next REAL cutting edge medium will be, because that’s how he makes his living. And unlike those who cheerlead mindlessly, Kevin is anything but mindless. He is quite fixed on making sure that whatever he decides to throw his weight behind is the horse he really wants to back. He makes no bones about his purposes, and he’s got no hidden agenda. You’ve got to respect that.
And finally, I am drawn to people who are blunt, like Prof. Yabut’s good friend David, I might add, because they mean what they say and they say what they mean. There’s no namby-pamby butt licking going on here. I don’t agree with Kevin on everything about twitter, and still think it may ultimately fade when too much time is wasted for too little content, and I have serious doubts about the value of all this networking and community nonsense, particularly since it’s far too superficial to really be of any substantive worth. But that said, it is most definitely here and, at least for now, clearly being used by a whole lotta folks. And wherever the folks are, they are, and there’s no arguing with that.
And I don’t fault Kevin for saying so, loud and clear, or creating lextweet to make the most of it, for better or worse.
That’s so immature.
Gosh, Scott, I’m really sorry you feel that way.
Someone has to be the grown up around here. I just wish it wasn’t me.