How Should Young Lawyers Conduct Themselves Online?

There’s more there, particularly about how there is a dearth of mentoring options for most new law grads. The economy is bad, firms aren’t hiring, and new law grads are being forced to hang their shingles. The chorus of life for a 21st century law school graduate: Twitter. Happy Hour. Above the Law.

Kevin’s central premise seems to be: “what’s wrong with these new law grads seeking out mentors online?” These poor souls don’t have the time or money to engage in CLEs, networking, and the like that used to give rise to mentoring opportunities in the past. But there lies something else ghosting its way through his post- that these new lawyers should begin to aggregate and filter news and information. They should choose a specific legal niche and then share that with others in some vain hope that it will attract the attention of more seasoned lawyers who will want to befriend them.

Although there is nothing to indicate how these brand new lawyers are supposed to understand what is interesting or significant in a niche area of law or why a more seasoned lawyer would start following them. Why is the seasoned lawyer wasting their time on Twitter anyway?

Manufactured Identities

This is a particularly interesting topic to me personally, as I’m exactly the type of “young lawyer,” Kevin is referring to in his post. I struck out blogging as a 3L. When I started blogging I wasn’t looking for mentoring. I had only vague initial goals: explore my thoughts on what it meant to be a young lawyer – and how to become a better one. It seemed the only suitable topic because choosing any specific area of law to cover would entail me doing something I’m not comfortable with doing: pretending to be something that I’m not.

I thought about crafting a blog around a specific niche/practice area, but anything I posted would be conjecture or posturing. There is an argument that a person can learn a great deal by writing about a topic – one that I agree with. But I wouldn’t share that writing if it was on a topic I wasn’t familiar with and I wasn’t confident in my ability to discuss it intelligently with other people. So I keep my writing to what I know: self-improvement, personal management, technology, social media. Yet many other new lawyers online don’t seem to have the same self-restraint.

The ease of publishing that has arisen with the internet has pros and cons. It allows people to readily have a voice – but is also requires readers to have their BS detectors set to High as very few people actually have anything worthy to say.

While nominally a blog is for other people to read – I’m selfish – I want my blogging to make me better professionally and personally. In doing so I don’t need to project some sort of farcical, manicured version of myself online in order to “win friends and influence people,” gain clients, or whatever. This isn’t what Kevin is advocating but it certainly seems to be par for the course for many of the new lawyers coming online. They tailor the image they project of themselves online in order to make themselves much “larger” than they are in real life – all in the hopes of appearing to be a “thought leader“and gain traffic. Look no further than the recent scandal of Joseph Rakofsky.

Gaining Mentors and Attracting an Audience

In the 6 months after I started Associate’s Mind it went from having zero web presence online to the 41st most popular legal blog out of the almost 500 tracked by Avvo.com.* I dropped off the blogging scene for two months to take the bar and my blog dropped into the 140s. But I’ve been back blogging now for less than a month and Associate’s Mind is listed as the 54th most popular legal blog on Avvo.

All this time: No SEO, no social media strategy, no other crap because I think all that stuff is maybe 10% of being successful in the online space. I’ve posted extensively about it before; see the free legal blogging statistical report for details. It’s not about the ancillary methods a person uses to deliver their message online – the message is what matters. Glancing at the stats, (stripping away all bots, crawlers, etc.) Associate’s Mind has had roughly 10,000 unique page views since Monday. That easily eclipses the vast majority of law blogs. Not to mention that articles from the site have been shared and linked through Reddit, The Browser, WSJ, Forbes, YCombinator, Law Technology News, etc. Numerous other blogs and websites (legal and otherwise) have written about posts they have read on Associate’s Mind.

I bring all this up not to boast, but to point out that I’ve succeeded in the legal blogging world without having to pretend to be something that I am not. I am not “faking it til I’m making it.” I am a recent law graduate who is just now taking my initial steps in the profession. I have a variety of thoughts and ideas on how to conduct oneself as an attorney. I look forward to a long journey towards mastery – one that does not end. Hopefully you’ll want to ride alongside me for part of the way there.

And I don’t want to have to trick you into doing it.