Justin Green on the power of Twitter

Justin Green on the right pictured during another interview.

The Nebraskan native and DC-blogger (at the Washington Examiner) Justin Green (@JGreenDC) sat down with fellow blogger Matt Lewis to discuss a range of topics including Twitter and blogging (listen here). Here's some interesting snippets. On the power of Twitter Justin said:

"For young journalists it's the greatest networking tool in the world. It's how I got my start in DC. You follow someone and interact with them; if they like what you're doing they'll follow you back."

Justin then explained how exactly Twitter has served him personally. He said:

"It's how I started with you [Matt Lewis]. It's how I got started working with my current boss David [Frum] (Justin is no longer with the Daily Beast)."

Seth Godin on fearing social media

Seth Godin on man's resistance to change, used the common mirror as the example and explain social media aversion. Interesting. He said in the blog post here:

"Mirrors and cameras each took a generation or more to catch on as widespread foundations of our culture. It's not surprising, then, that so many people fear social media. It's about us, and when we're on the hook, in front of people we can't know or trust, we hold back. For a while. And then we don't."

Looking back on the Summer's Legal Commentary

Below is a round-up of some of the latest and best observations made on the state of the legal industry in the UK and US.

Legal Innovators and Entrepreneurship:

"Law firms composed of visionaries have the ability to rise to become leaders of a new industry."

Lawyers and law firms are stuck in a steam bath of trouble. For lawyers and law firms to get out of this pickle and succeed in a world of excess capacity, they need to change. This has been the prescription I’ve heard time after time.

Including from the Wall Street Journal here, from the Hildebrandt Institute here, from the ABA Journal here, from the Global Legal Post here, from the Managing Partners Forum here, on the Lawyer Magazine here and on the American Lawyer here.

And of course I always refer to the following reports by: Deloitte (UK), PWC (UK),the Law Society of England and Wales (UK), Citi-Hildebrandt (US), Wells Fargo (US), Georgetown-Reuters (US) and the FT. 

Eminent Former Judge, Henry Brooke Joins Twitter

#legalaid I was asked to write an article expressing some of my views on the JR legal aid reforms. Here it is. http://t.co/xEMYrxJkEU
— Henry Brooke (@HenryBrooke1) August 8, 2013

The Lawyer's Email Hysteria of the 1990s

In an interview with litigator-turned-presenter James D. Zirin, Richard Susskind spoke of how his mid-1990s suggestions that lawyers would use email were rubbished and silenced by the settled legal establishment. Backing-up the discussion a bit, Richard Susskind explained the context in this way:

“I look at the tax profession. I look at the way they handle tax risk, the way they identify, control, manage, hedge, monitor tax risk: they use sophisticated tools and techniques to help clients, not simply resolve their problems, but say, on the horizon are 4 problems you’re likely to face and here’s how you can manage and control these risks." 

 James D. Zirin then breached the email-hysteria topic. He asked Susskind:

"You’ve been working in this area for about 30 years. When you got started there was considerable resistance at the English Bar to your ideas, isn’t that true – that the Law Society (what we in the US call the American Bar Association) didn’t want you to speak in public?”

Richard Susskind discusses Twitter and Facebook, Ctd

Richard Susskind, legal technology specialist, continues with his discussion of social media:

"If my clients are sending out regular messages of about what they're doing, where they're going and what they're doing, I would want to be part of that; even if the mechanism of communication is a daft name."

Richard Susskind discusses Twitter and Facebook

At 23 minutes of the video above and here, legal technology specialist Richard Susskind discusses the usefulness and merit of social media as it relates to law practice. Susskind then said at the end of the discussion that in 5 years time, social media will become mainstream and ubiquitous.

"In 5 years time we'll have embraced [social media]... I'll just take you back to 1995 when people were sceptical about email..."

He also made an interesting point about how junior lawyers use social media:

"To be fair most junior lawyers don't use [social media] for business purposes..."