It’s surprising how much conversations around social media have shifted over the last three years. There used to be a tacit understanding that LinkedIn was for professional posts only, deal announcements, partner moves, conferences, market commentary and the like, while Facebook (and Twitter, if you really must) was for everything else. Hilarious memes and posts about your children/pet/culinary experiment/exercise humblebrag had no place on a professional networking platform.
That all changed dramatically with the onset of Covid and nothing to do but use social media as the main means of communicating with the outside world. One contact, who is rather more Gen X than Millennial, bemoaned an internal memo instructing people to show more of a human side in the curation of their Zoom backgrounds and on LinkedIn. Wasn’t this a bit awkward? Do I really want my clients knowing (horror of horrors) the ins and outs of my domestic life? It was a particularly British quandary, a cultural aversion to oversharing; the online equivalent of maintaining a professional stiff upper lip.
Memories are long on the Twittersphere. Some things are best left untweeted.
Critics may say that LinkedIn is heading towards jumping the shark; that its raison d’être as a professional networking forum and showcase for professional achievements has been undermined by the blurring of lines with the likes of Twitter, Instagram and now even TikTok. Many of the lawyers interviewed for our cover feature, ‘Winning friends and influencing people’, are alive to the hazards of Twitter, the many trolls that lurk there, not to mention the problematic questions around its acquisition by Elon Musk last year. Crucially, tweets are easy to rattle off in haste, only to be repented at leisure. Memories are long on the Twittersphere – who among us can expunge the image of Jolyon Maugham KC, who in a 2019 interview with Legal Business described Twitter as a ‘toxic sewer’, clubbing a fox to death on Boxing Day with a baseball bat while wearing his wife’s ‘too small green kimono’? Some things are best left untweeted.
For many, it is about striking a balance between using these platforms to engender genuinely valuable debates around diversity, equity and inclusion or legal ethics, or simple profile-building and networking, without going down the rabbit hole of an all-out public bunfight into the bargain.
As Doughty Street Chambers barrister Adam Wagner summarises: ‘With the debate over the cab rank rule, there are certain lawyers who will say: “This is a bunch of sanctimonious, virtue-signalling, irresponsible idiots.” I’d like to think I’d never take that position. Because as soon as there is a valid debate, by going for the individuals, you’re avoiding the debate.’
With the lack of social diversity in the legal industry arguably the most pressing challenge the profession faces, it is clear that social media has real potential in helping to expedite a solution to that problem, even as law firm initiatives plainly continue to fail.
It is difficult to see how aspiring solicitors from non-traditional backgrounds having access via social media to an increasingly diverse set of voices, including those charting their experiences of alternative routes into the profession like the SQE, can have a material downside.
Professional social media will never be for everyone, but there is little denying that for the many who choose their words wisely and take the rough with the smooth, the likers with the haters, the upsides can be plentiful.
nathalie.tidman@legalease.co.uk
See ‘Social media influencers: Winning friends and influencing people’