Belief can be a wonderful thing, but it can play havoc with your judgement. Take social media, a phenomenon that is changing the face of global communication in a way that largely speaks for itself. But is it changing the world of business, or legal services? You’d certainly think so from the emerging band of self-styled online gurus and hardened internet utopians that spare no opportunity to tell law firms that they need to get with it.
A common defining characteristic of this breed is heavy deployment of ecological allusions in which law firms are told that they need to ‘evolve or die’. While not always spelt out, said evolution seems to involve spending less time foraging for sustenance among bluechip companies and banks and rather more time using the new hunter-gatherer tools of blogging, tweeting or whatever verb you use to describe messing about on Facebook. To listen to some of this crowd you may conclude that having an awesome corporate Twitter account is the developmental equivalent for law firms of fire, the wheel or opposable thumbs.
