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Social Mobility - A little less conversation, a little more action please

By Naveen Tulli

Global Managing Director, Laurence Simons International Legal Recruitment. With over 20 years experience within the global in-house market at Laurence Simons, Naveen has gained unrivalled expertise and experience working with some of the world’s best known multinationals. 

Besides the Facebook IPO, the demise of yet another Yahoo! CEO and the potential withdrawal of Greece from the Euro zone; social mobility has been the talk of the town this week. The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, recently announced the Government’s new social mobility strategy and I have to say, I remain skeptical. Although social mobility is the one topic that politicians seem to be able to agree on, it is also the one that year on year they manage to not deliver on. 

Lawyers are closet entrepreneurs

International legal recruitment specialists, Laurence Simons conducted a survey of 323 lawyers posing the question, “If you hadn’t have chosen the legal path, which career might you have chosen to pursue instead?” 39% (the largest proportion of respondents) indicated Entrepreneur.

Less surprising are the 19.5% of lawyers who chose Politics, as over the last 20 years, a significant proportion of the Cabinet have had legal backgrounds. 15.8% selected Teaching, 12.1% said they would abandon the legal field to start up their own restaurant and 6.8% would consider a career as a Builder, Decorator, Electrician or Plumber. Only 6.8% selected Accountant as a career of choice.

Farewell to the Oil Age - What does that mean for Lawyers?

By Chrissie Lightfoot 

Chrissie Lightfoot is CEO of EntrepreneurLawyer Limited where she advises professional service firms (and their individual people) globally on marketing, personal branding, sales, social media, social networking and innovation. The (London) Times newspaper recently reported Chrissie as one of the Top Ten Best Legal Tweeters.

She is a non-practising solicitor, an entrepreneur, international keynote speaker and author, best noted for her groundbreaking book the Naked Lawyer: RIP to XXX – How to Market, Brand and Sell YOU!    

Law firms can no longer hope to survive by providing legal advice alone. If they are to thrive in an increasingly technology-driven era, they must add value in the data field - and be generally more human.

According to Gerd Leonhard, – described as one of the world’s ‘leading media futurists’ by the Wall Street Journal – ‘data is now the new oil’. He proclaims that the legal profession is in the content business, the marketing business and, ultimately, the data business. Why? Because the world is headed towards systems of peer-to-peer collaboration, unbundling and fragmentation. Mr Leonhard says: "We’re living in a digital society where there is a different world view on control, ownership and authority".

Social media dinotopia in law law land - Part II

By Chrissie Lightfoot 

Chrissie Lightfoot is CEO of EntrepreneurLawyer Limited where she advises professional service firms (and their individual people) globally on marketing, personal branding, sales, social media, social networking and innovation. The (London) Times newspaper recently reported Chrissie as one of the Top Ten Best Legal Tweeters.

She is a non-practising solicitor, an entrepreneur, international keynote speaker and author, best noted for her groundbreaking book the Naked Lawyer: RIP to XXX – How to Market, Brand and Sell YOU!    

Continued.... 

Playground and office

Because of the ubiquity of the worldwide web and the internet in business, not even the traditionally conservative legal sector has been able to ignore it and social media has become an integral part of that environment. It is evolving into our 21st-century playground and office space and there are now 1.2 billion active users on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+  totalling a sixth of the world’s population.

Law firm clients, prospective clients, competitors, friends and family use social media. If lawyers do not engage they are going to be excluded from the globally networked society and collaborative community. They will feel ostracised because they will be ignorant of the context in which the seven vices – wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony – are now played out online. As lawyers, if we hope to represent clients – whether in contentious or non-contentious matters – we’re going to have to understand and empathise with them in the space they frequent.

Social media is a medium through which we can interact on a more personal level with contacts, show-case our professional accomplishments, expand our knowledge, amplify our core messages, start and monitor conversations, find potential customers, carry out public relations, manage our (brand) reputations and provide extraordinary client service by satisfying the expectations of our customers in ‘real-time’.

With social media, a little effort can produce a return of a four, five, or even six-figure instruction, reaching a potential annual seven-figure revenue from social networking activity alone. With potential numbers like those, why wouldn’t you want use social media?

The bottom line is that being a successful lawyer in the 21st century requires being sociable in 21st-century media. Lawyers who use the free social media streams will have a higher survival rate. And that’s why, all things considered, I’m happy confessing my guilt as a social savvy lawyer. The defence rests.

A version of this article was first published in....The Global Legal Post 27^th April 2012

 

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Social media dinotopia in law law land - Part I

By Chrissie Lightfoot 

Chrissie Lightfoot is CEO of EntrepreneurLawyer Limited where she advises professional service firms (and their individual people) globally on marketing, personal branding, sales, social media, social networking and innovation. The (London) Times newspaper recently reported Chrissie as one of the Top Ten Best Legal Tweeters.

She is a non-practising solicitor, an entrepreneur, international keynote speaker and author, best noted for her groundbreaking book the Naked Lawyer: RIP to XXX – How to Market, Brand and Sell YOU!    

Social media is not just a place for people to share their holiday snaps or keep up with celebrity gossip. Business lawyers need to get chatting and tweeting or risk extinction.

I’m guilty. Guilty beyond reasonable doubt of having a social media addiction – of being a savvy social networking, social media junkie.

I’m here to defend my case against the cynics who continually persecute and ridicule me and my fellow junkies in the misguided belief that social media is a fad, a trend – a charade even.

I have often had to listen politely to the smug bluster of middle-aged know-alls pompously promulgating the argument that the beneficiaries of social media are limited to dysfunctional teenagers who have lost the ability to communicate by traditional human means, or fading ‘celebrities’ who are trying to generate some temporary public interest in their near-forgotten careers?

But we lawyers mustn’t be prejudiced by the blinkered views of the frightened or lazy. Instead we should embrace the extraordinary benefits of social media.

Why? Because of the simple and practical business phenomenon of the ‘survival of the savviest’.

Joining the dots

Let’s join these dots: global economic crisis, emerging economies, increased competition, population and employment time bombs, stretched resources (economic, physical, environmental), artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetics, social networking, the evolution of web 2.0 to 4.0, runaway technological acceleration, working patterns and lifestyle change, consumer sovereignty, spoilt-for-choice clients, too many ‘fat’ law firms, too many lawyers and increasing moves to dispense with lawyers at every level.

In the contemporary business environment, there are only three kinds of lawyers: unemployed, relatively low-paid assembly line workers and top-end super-lawyers. The third category is populated by those with the ability continually to generate income through attracting, relating to and serving clients in the space they occupy for play and work. In other words, cyber-space – social media and social networks.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the American inventor, scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2010 computers would ‘become essentially invisible – woven into our clothing, embedded in our furniture and environment’. He said they would tap into the ‘world-wide mesh’ and that we’d have wireless internet communication at all times. He was right, as the widespread adoption of smart ‘phones and tablets for both work and leisure demonstrates. And in 2010, Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg said ‘over the next five years or so, social networking will make it possible to pick any industry and rethink it’. And it has…

To be continued….watch this space.

A version of this article was first published in....The Global Legal Post 27^th April 2012

 

What did you think of this post? Feel free to leave your comments and questions below.

 

Looking for a new legal opportunity? Search and apply for the latest opportunities from onTotallyLegal