The Lawyers Weekly - September 23, 2011

BUSINESS
CAREERS

THE

Canada’s top legal social media influencers

IN CASE there’s anyone out there who still believes that social media in the law was a fad, it’s time to put that myth to rest. Today, the Canadian legal profession features more than 300 blogs (check them out at www. lawblogs.ca), hundreds if not thousands of Twitter users, and probably well over 10,000 LinkedIn users, virtually all of them using these vehicles for business. Almost every large law firm in Canada (and scores of smaller ones) have their own Twitter accounts. And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s happening on Facebook or Google+.

With so many participants in this now-emergent field, it’s natural to ask: who are the leaders? Where should we turn to find the most important and influential social media users in the profession, the trailblazers who aren’t just on social media, but who are using it to make an impact on lawyers and the legal profession worldwide? As two regular columnists here at The Lawyer Weekly, we found ourselves curious about that too.

So we decided to find out who were the most influential users of social media in the Canadian legal

WARREN SMITH

&JORDAN
FURLONG

profession. To do this, we started with a very large group of bloggers, tweeters and other social media users well known to the online legal community. (Although we’re both very active in social media ourselves, we decided it would be appropriate to exclude ourselves from the list.)

From there, we applied a series of criteria, some based on metrics and others not:

n;Whether the person blogs, and if so, for how long s/he has been blog-ging, how widely read the blog is and how well it scores on measures such as Google’s PageRank. n;Whether the person is on Twitter, and if so, how much they’ve tweeted, how often they tweet and what their followers-to-follows ratio is (the higher, the better). n;What the person’s Klout score is, a measure based on a Twitter account’s frequency, reach and influence. n;Our own sense of the impact the person has had and continues to have through social media on the Canadian legal profession.

Applying those criteria, we came
up with two lists of 12 influencers
each, for a total of 24. We divided
the group into lawyers in private
practice with law firms and, well,
everyone else. We’ve listed their
names alphabetically, although
there are a few outliers whose
impact is so huge they require spe-
cial mention.