Legal Commentary

Marc Osborn and the gang over at LexisNexis' Martindale Hubbell have now officially launched Martindale Hubbell Connect, which has been in beta for a while. Bob Ambrogi raved about it in his Web Watch column last September in Law Technology News.

As part of the launch celebrations, MHC invited six bloggers to do a mini-carnival from March 30-April 6. MHC asked us to pontificate on social networking for lawyers, and MHC is posting links to each of our blogs. I'm honored to be invited, and happy to participate ? especially in such good company: LexisNexis' Kathleen Delaney started it all Monday; Rees Morrison (Law Dept. Management)  had day 2; Law.com's tech editor Sean Doherty tackled April Fool's Day; Bob Ambrogi drew the straw for Thursday;  I have the reins today, and then Larry Bodine closes it all out on Opening Day. 

Speaking of Ambrogi, he's always hipper-than-hip, and I count on him to point the way to new, kewl tech stuff. In fact, Ambrogi and Incisive Media's CEO Bill Pollak (@wpollak) can be mildly annoying to this tech editor, because they always seem find the latest greatest tech tool (or toy)  just slightly faster than I do ? which I generally attribute to the fact that both of them are parents of young adults. I'm parent only to a dog and cat who somehow have not mastered the computer keyboard (give them time), but one of these days I'm determined to find something kewl before these two dudes. :)

Anyway, all three of us are now pretty damned obsessed with Twitter. Bob (@bobambrogi)  has written two great columns in the last year:  Tweet Sixteen -- in December, where he talked about 16 reasons why lawyers should take Twitter seriously, and  Let Twitter Sing, in March, where he ID'd numerous 3rd-party tools to help addicts become efficient power-users. 

Indeed, many Incisive folks have contracted Twitter fever, and others are at least testing the water. One of the latest folks to dive in is Aric Press (@aricpress), the editor-in-chief of The American Lawyer. And Incisive "entity" IDs are popping up like Spring daffodils: @AmLawDaily; @LegalTechShow; @LawTechNews; @EDDUpdate, so on and so forth.

Sean Doherty (@legaltechtrek) and I (@commonscold) are both on board, but the winner for first early adopter within Incisive is probably LTN's new associate editor, Theodora Blanchfield (@tblanchfield) -- who was twittering LONG before the I.M. Baby Boomers got wind of it -- she was singing a full year ago. 

Anyway.... for me, at first, Twitter didn't make a whole lot of sense. I thought it was fun and interesting and arguably more productive than playing BubbleBreaker on my Samsung Saga when I needed a quick break from editing. But my Eureka moment came when a story crashed, and I needed a last minute replacement. I tweeted that I was looking for a security story. Within an hour,  Vivian Tero  pinged me expressing interest, and wrote an absolutely terrific article, "Dangerous Shadows," about why it's important to be careful when social networking because seemingly innocuous personal information can come back to haunt you.

I knew I was officially drinking the Kool-Aid when I moderated a panel at LegalTech New York, featuring Kevin O'Keefe (@kevinokeefe), Chris Winfield (@chriswinfield), and Matt Homann (@matthoman) -- with a cameo from Bob Ambrogi. They were awesome, and outlined even more ways to effectively use Twitter. The best takeaway was their instructions on how to use Twitter's search functions (www.search.twitter.com). My skills grew logarithmically after Guy Kawasaki's(@guykawasaki)  intoxicating keynote at our Search Engine Strategies conference in March. (See Kawasaki's link for a huge list of 3rd-party apps).

One of Kawasaki's points was that companies can use Twitter to monitor complaints and accolades, and immediately respond to customers. Sure enough, I soon experienced that first-hand.  After being stuck in Manhattan for three weeks with the Nor-eastern flu from hell, I ran into a leeeetle problem when my car battery died while I was loading up the aforementioned dog and cat to go to my upstate cottage. Of COURSE I was illegally parked (this is Manhattan!) and I went into a cold panic. I called AAA and they rescued me in 20-minutes with a battery boost, and offered such amazingly good service (they even called me back to be sure I was OK) that I tweeted about it. Sure enough, within minutes of my rave, I got a thank-you tweet from @AAAauto saying they were happy I was happy. Good customer service? You betcha. 

So what's next?  We're going to reprise the LTNY Twitter panel at LegalTech West Coast, June 25 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, at 2:15 p.m. Kevin O'Keefe and Matt Homann will be returning, joined by solo Denise Howell (@dhowell) and Baker & Hostetler associate Nina Goldberg (@Ninakat). Do join us. We've already set up a "hash tag* for the LA show - #LTWC. (The New York panel #LTNY was widely live-Tweeted.)

Well, enough. Gotta go Twitter. I'm still looking for two tix to the April 16 home opener at Yankee Stadium, and hoping that my Tweets and Facebook posts will help me find someone who wants to sell 2 tix for under $250. (No bleachers please). Sellers can reach me at monica.bay@incisivemedia.com.

Bodine's watching the store on Monday. I'll be at Camden Yards -- It's Opening Day 2009!!! Go Yankees!

* a code so others can easily find tweets related to the topic