While older lawyers continue to resist the inevitable, unconditional surrender to social media as our Overlord, Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs explains why we must capitulate, give ourselves over to the unstoppable tide. At the moment, 54% of companies block access to social media, the lifeblood of our youth. Why, oh why, he asks.
On the one side, there is the fear of corporations and law firms that opening their computers to social media will mean that their younger personnel, digital natives, will spend all day watching twitter and facebook, chuckling at cute kitten pictures and updating their status. The HR types say this could impair productivity. The clients might be concerned that young lawyers might not find enough time between twits to represent them before heading out for work/life balance at Happy Hour.
Kevin counters these specious concerns with hard, cold facts. While he lists five reasons, two struck me as particularly critical.
More of your lawyers are relying on social networks to do their jobs. How often do you turn to friends and colleagues online for advice? How often do you read blogs to keep up with industry trends? Data suggests 25 percent of employees rely heavily on social networks in the workplace. It’s probably higher for your star lawyers and other professionals.
You’re staring down the clock, a minute to midnight, with a critical issue to be addressed that spells life or death for your client. You draw a blank. Nothing. Come the morning, some partner who can’t write an email by himself is going to either slap you on the back for a brilliant job, or point you to the door for having blown the biggest case on the firm’s docket. What to do?
An old codger might think, research! Hit the casebooks, the statutes, maybe even law reviews if you’re desperate enough. Think. Think hard. Aw, you foolish codger. The young lawyer knows the solution that eludes you. Ask all your friends on Twitter!!! So what if you don’t actually know them, and can’t say for sure that they’re really lawyers, or have more than 12 minutes experience, or just spend all day blowing off steam on social media to be such a happy person, complimenting everyone else’s witty twit and deeply empathizing with those suffering pain and sorrow.
Crowd source. Bleg. Whatever. The internet can’t be wrong. And everyone you’ve ever met on the internet, your true friends, are invariably authentic and brilliant, just like you.
Forget about the fact that young lawyers’ eyes are filled with tears, facing a mountain of debt without hope of employment. Sure they need money, to buy the BMW they can drive to the debt reduction service office to avoid repayment of their student loans. Sure, they hope and dream of the day when their Cheetos will never run dry and they will achieve their mother’s dream of legal hegemony, so she can tell the neighbor woman that her son the lawyer is doing just as well as the other woman’s son, the doctor. But enough about that, since they won’t work for you anyway.You’re going to lose lawyers and other professionals to competitors. Per a study by American Express, 39 percent of younger workers won’t even consider working for a company that blocks Facebook. Facebook has become the communication tool of choice for many young professionals. Why would they work for a law that’s going to block its use?
To deny them social media is to deny them air to breath. No matter how fascinating the work, or even how good the pay, 39% of younger workers “won’t even consider” working for you. As they walk into your office in their pressed blue suit and flip-flops, they are testing the waves flying silently through your office to sense whether the Facebook wall is omnipresent. If they don’t get the tingle, you’ve lost them before your first question.
The problem isn’t whether younger workers, for whom social media is the substitute for the life they pretend to have, can live without social media. They can’t. They know they can’t. They don’t understand why you don’t get it too, except to realize that you are so utterly stupid as to not realize that the future is here and they will put you on an ice floe and send you out into the frigid arctic sea at their first opportunity.
But then, it’s not like they can spend a few minutes checking status, just taking a momentary break from the hard work before them, the stuff you actually pay them to do and the stuff that actually inures to the benefit of clients. It’s an addiction. It’s a world that never stops, never goes away. The few minutes becomes an hour, every time some chime sounds signifying that someone, somewhere, has written something that must immediately be seen. To call it Pavlovian is insufficient; it’s heroin.
Whether my prediction that we will eventually come to the realization that sitting in front of a screen, eyes glazed and drool dripping on the QWERTY keypad, for as many hours as we can stay awake, is not our fate. At some point, cool kids will break free of the internet slavery and do the unthinkable. Go outside. Be unreachable. Touch living skin.
Until then, however, the Slackoisie eschew the old codgers, the curmudgeons, and demand their right to constant access to social media, lest a cute kitten picture escape their immediate attention. The only words they have to say to us dinosaurs is, “get more Cheetos.”
Kevin is disturbed that a whopping 54% of companies still deny their employees unfettered access to social media. I’m disturbed that a whopping 46% don’t.
Update: Via Ed at Blawg Review.
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I don’t understand why employers in any field feel the need to block social media sites (yes, I’m a final law student, though I think social media is a great way to waste your life). If someone’s use of social media – or the internet or their phones or anything else – interferes with their work, then it’s a problem. Nobody has the right to a job, you have to earn it and then work hard to keep it. Any firm worth its salt has procedures to deal with underperforming employees. If it doesn’t interfere with their work, then who cares?
In the job market for young lawyers here in Australia, anyone spending so much time on facebook that their work suffered would be replaced pretty quick. There are hordes of unemployed law grads who would be more than happy to take their place. I imagine things are the same in the US.
You might want to consider why, from an employer’s or client’s perspective, they would prefer to prevent problems/disasters from happening rather than suffer them and clean up the mess afterward.
You’d be surprised at the stuff witnesses (this includes cops) will post on Facebook. I know I was. Any lawyer who does trial work needs access to Facebook. MySpace too.
As I always say, who doesn’t enjoy a good non-sequitur.
But the ‘problems/disasters’ don’t stem from the availability of social media. Most people my age have smartphones. Anyone who wants to use social media will sit in their office looking at facebook on their phone if they can’t use their work computer to do it. More to the point, anyone who wants to waste time that badly will find other ways to do it. Didn’t you ever lock yourself in a room in swot vac, only to find that doodling was more interesting than studying?
I guess what I was trying to get at was threefold:
1. From my experience at major firms, people are too busy to waste time on the internet. Partners will be shouting if people are twitting instead of working.
2. In my experience, people are too scared of underperforming to waste time on social media. If you don’t meet your billable hours targets, prepare to be ‘performance managed’.
3. If anyone is stupid enough to slack off to the extent anyone notices, there are procedures in place to deal with it.
There have always been underperforming employees. There have always been slackers. Social media is a new way for people to slack off, not a qualitatively different way.
Though for the record, anyone asking teh internetz instead of doing research is a muppet.
If that’s so, then they won’t miss it and won’t refuse to work for any company that blocks social media. Problem solved. But turning the corner from slacker kid to producing lawyer is difficult, and the internet is like an aphrodisiac, seducing young lawyer who aren’t really thrilled at putting their nose to the grindstone with the lure of fun and frolic. Eliminate the seduction to the extent possible and it’s that less of a problem.
Bottom line is that lawyers are there to be lawyers, not to enjoy themselves while being paid to be lawyers. I know, just an awful thought to people your age (whatever that age may be). But when you get grownup paychecks and take on grownup responsibilities, it’s time to put away the smartphones and act like a grownup.