Don't pay lip service to social media

I don’t use Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn; it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t make them work for me. I’ve asked lots of people to help, but they’re just the same. That’s why we’ve launched the new micro-blogging and social networking site centred around lawyers: Mootis.

We all know, don’t we, that social networking is here to stay, so the new Mootis platform
is designed and intended to combine the best bits of other social media sites.

Communication is at the heart of the new site. Over the years, I would say there’s little doubt that a major criticism of the legal profession has been its poor communication. We’re not always good at communicating with the outside world: in my area of catastrophic injury, we just can’t seem to fight back against the ambulance-chasing image. Looking inwards,
I’m not sure we optimise communicating with each other: again, in my world, the divide between claimant and defendant has been vast.

I can’t see any reason why the legal profession should be different from the rest of the world in relation to social media. Most firms and chambers doubtless pay lip service at least to the existing sites, but I do wonder how well we all make them work for us. Equally, it does seem to be clear that ‘new’ avenues are opening up.

There are many different ways we could do this, but one that fascinates me is the notion of creating your own discussion topic or poll. In my case, I want to replace the court system of managing catastrophic injury claims with an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) system, which I call neutral facilitation. I’ve written about it quite a lot, but a web discussion between claimant and defendant lawyers, leading to a poll or polls, could be interesting. The results could be shown to the Ministry of Justice or the NHS, or to the claimant and defendant organisations which operate within personal injury,
to demonstrate the need for change.

Again, I know that webinars are common, but how many of us know that if we research a point in a case, or write an article, we can just spend quarter of an hour talking about it in front of our computer, and then post it; it might be so much more interesting to see the author talking. Four of those, totalling one hour, and CPD (if it’s needed in the future, following the recent change for solicitors) will be easy.

An important development could and should be the extension of communication to make the existing system more accessible for young people considering the law as a profession. For example, at Exchange Chambers, we run a forum every year for those considering pupillage, and we get good feedback about how valuable they find it. We could widen its scope if we used social media more accurately. The ability for those people to have contact with junior and senior practitioners, in an informal way, could be of real benefit.

There are over 350,000 people working in legal services in the UK alone, and the law impacts on the lives of millions of people every day. It is time we had our own bespoke platform – and that’s the logic behind Mootis. SJ

Bill Braithwaite QC is a barrister at Exchange Chambers and founder of Mootis