September 18, 2008

A Brand of One

Came across a terrific blog post today from Jordan Furlong (Editor-in-Chief at CBA's National magazine) today on his Law21.cablog entitled "We are all solos" about the rising importance for lawyers of cultivating a personal brand as we move increasingly towards a milieu in which lateral movement and declining loyalty between firms and lawyers (both directions) is a fact of life.
I was struck by the intersection of this thought with an article that appeared in the Vancouver Sun today entitled "Self-promotion may be key to getting more women on boards." The basic tenet of this latter article is that women are continuing to be under-represented on corporate boards in Canada in part because they are under-exposed to the executives doling out board positions. In the article lawyer Elizabeth Watson of Watson Advisors inc. attributes this to women being less-inclined to blow their own horn as it were, and choosing instead to attribute success as a team effort. As a result, a website has been established (womeninthelead.ca) to identify and profile women in Canada suitable for consideration for board positions - a list which which has grown to include over 850 individuals.
But the message that emerges from both these sources is clear - male or female, lawyers need to start doing more thinking about their own individual brand than has historically been the case. If you don't, who will? And Furlong is bang-on when he points to the web (blogs, social networking sites like LinkedIn and other online applications (podcasts, Twitter feeds, etc.) as the place where this brand-building is increasingly going to occur.

Posted by dougjasinski at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2008

"What fresh hell is this?" Exploring Twitter for lawyers

I think we can all agree that most lawyers already feel the perpetual crunch of excessive demands on their time. Between practice management, administration, professional development, firm and practice group meetings, and traditional business development activities like speaking engagements and industry association participation, one must also squeeze full helpings of billable work and family time which doesn't leave a lot of space in the margins for exploring new technologies. But stay current one must. To that end, I have noted over the last month or two that my own personal network of legal technology gurus/early adopters (a list that includes Steve Matthews, Kevin O'Keefe, and David Bilinsky amongst others) have all taken to a "micro-blogging" tool called Twitter.

Twitter fits somewhere in between text messaging and blogging. Twitter asks you to continually answer the simple question "what are you doing?" and limits you to a 140 character response. My first reaction was "I don't get it". My second reaction was "why on earth would I want to know what a whole bunch of other people are doing every minute of the day and how badly do I (or my lawyer clients) need another boatload of digital errata in their lives? Steve Matthews has tackled these questions head on in this blog post. I'll be honest: I still don't get it - yet. But I've decided to give it a go in any event because I'm confident that my early adopter crew isn't all playing in this sandbox by accident. I'll keep you updated on my progress and my thoughts on how Twitter may or may not be relevant as I go. Stay tuned.

Posted by dougjasinski at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack