LinkedIn’s Legal Updates: made in heaven?
Jinfo Blog

30th July 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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LinkedIn, the social network for people in suits, has joined forces with recent start-up JD Supra to offer crowd-sourced law articles and analysis to LinkedIn members. In effectively creating yet another legal community, it’s entering an increasingly crowded field – and with any crowd, there’s always the problem of whose view you can really rely on. Legal Updates is aimed at two groups: lawyers who want to show off their expertise by sharing content online, and other professionals who need a steady stream of legal insights relevant to their industry. LinkedIn members who like what they see can connect with the lawyers responsible – which should be an incentive for yet more lawyers to join LinkedIn (http://digbig.com/5bccjh). It’s a feather in the cap of the two year old JD Supra, and the company is crowing about it (http://digbig.com/5bccjj). But, as Nancy Davis Kho reported on LiveWire a couple of months back, there are now quite a few social network tools for legal professionals (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29149) – and there’s always the risk that you spend so much time connecting that there’s less and less left for actual work. With a stream of self-selected legal comment and analysis cascading into their in-boxes, there’s also a distinct possibility that LinkedIn members may occasionally find it difficult to separate the excellent from the so-so. No matter how expert JD Supra’s community as a whole, and how well informed its insights generally, it’s pretty much inevitable that a few real turkeys will get through. In any case, as a new analysis from Gartner indicates, participants in any social network tend to slip into one of a number of pretty clearly defined categories. You need to be aware of the type you’re dealing with and take appropriate evasive action when necessary. ‘Connectors’ enjoy introducing people to each other, while ‘salesmen’ have a propensity to persuade people to do things and ‘seekers’ connect with others in order to tap their knowledge. Much tougher to deal with, Gartner suggests, are ‘mavens’ – experts in particular areas who use and acquire information for their own interests – and the ‘self-sufficient’, who find out things for themselves and are pretty impermeable to viral influences (http://digbig.com/5bccjk). Now admittedly Gartner is thinking in the consumer context, not business-to-business. But so recognisable are the types it profiles that it’s inconceivable that they can’t be found in more specialist communities as well. It was a Techcrunch blog posting last year that acted as the matchmaker between LinkedIn and JD Supra, which at that time was displaying its wares on the much less appropriate Facebook (http://digbig.com/5bccjm). This new alliance will no doubt add much of value – but it won’t necessarily always be a marriage made in heaven.

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