Legal Research

Just because you?re on Social Media doesn?t mean a licence to be unprofessional

By Simon Chester

That’s the message from an interesting piece in yesterday’s NYT entitled A Legal Battle: Online Attitude vs. Rules of the Bar .

Short extract suggests more issues in the future:

Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University Law School, sees many more missteps in the future, as young people who grew up with Facebook and other social media enter a profession governed by centuries of legal tradition.

“Twenty-somethings have a much-reduced sense of personal privacy,? Professor Gillers said. Younger lawyers are, predictably, more comfortable with the media than their older colleagues, according to a recent survey for LexisNexis, the legal database company: 86 percent of lawyers ages 25 to 35 are members of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, as opposed to 66 percent of those over 46. For those just out of law school, ?this stuff is like air to them,? said Michael Mintz, who manages an online community for lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

Its position on the front page of the paper suggests it’s going to be read by the managing partners, who will worry about potential damage to the value of the brand.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 14, 2009 (boomark / email).