The tech world has finally caught up with the business world, and the concept of networking has become the buzz activity for all ages.  Its a new trick, yet not a lot of old legal dogs have learned it. Austin advises you get with the programme.

When I was at school in the early 1970’s our geography teacher gave us a class on communications. He said anything that involved the movement of people, things or information could be categorised as a communication. As sniggering teenagers we made much of the fact that the transportation of sewage was included as an example of communication, albeit a slightly arcane one. But I recall that the height of communication technology allowed us to talk on the (mainly round-dial) telephone, and CB radio was a novelty.

How we have ramped it up since then. Ask any primary school child what she thinks are the most obvious forms of communication and she will jump to internet, MSN, Bebo, mobile - words meaning nothing in my younger days.

I was in early with the communications revolution. When I started working in the media in the early eighties, it was still before mass computerization, but I learned to type, because if you couldn’t type in a Scottish newsroom or TV department, you wouldn’t get a job. And when I joined BBC, STV etc, they were just about bringing in systems for word processing. When I joined my father’s firm as an assistant , I bought an Amstrad home computer and learned to use it, both the word processing and the data management parts of it – to his suspicion and doubt mainly I recall. What seems now like a museum exhibit from ancient Troy was then the cutting edge.
And mobiles – I was the first person I knew to have one. Bought a Motorola brick in 1988 , so that I could be phoned to rush to my wife when she was coming up to have our firstborn. I quickly realized it was an absolute logistical godsend to be able to speak to the office from anywhere. And it was no small satisfaction to be proved right, to the scorn of comrades, that one day women with their shopping in Safeway – sorry, Morrisons (how time flies) - would be using mobiles to talk to their families.

I could go on about being the IT and communications seer of East Kilbride legal practice, but we all eventually got swept along in the tide. Indeed here we are, you reading this blog on a pc , laptop, tablet, or other gizmo that has 150 times the computing capacity of all the Apollo spaceships put together.

But I am sure I am not alone in having a good idea of what is going to be a very big thing in legal work and particularly legal marketing. Social networking, in my case currently Facebook.

I joined up a few months ago, mainly because I thought I could check up on my daughter’s use of it, because I didn’t know what it was and feared the worst. In fact I realized almost immediately what was involved, and indeed was contacted by some very sober and respectable people to join on as friends with them. This harmless but I thought slightly pointless activity was there in the background, and I used it very little. But then I got an unexpected contact, from a person whom I had not seen since teenage.
This was/is a girl called Janie Gribben, whose family had been neighbours of ours in Glasgow when we were youngsters. I had not seen or heard of Janie since about 1977 when our family moved from our original house, but all of a sudden a message popped up from this ancient connection ( the connection is ancient – she is as young as I am …). An exchange of family history and information told me that the world is incredibly small – she married a guy who was at my school a couple of years above me – indeed her brother-in-law was in my class. She now lives in Perth, Australia, though the ease of communication is the same if she had been living in Perth, Perthshire.

Again, so far so good. Nothing groundbreaking about meeting old friends, even electronically in real time and half way round the world. But occasional chats led to me being told Janie, a trained nurse, has spent some time working as a volunteer with Mother Teresa’s organization in an orphanage in India. She sent me the journal kept of the work, the life, the grinding physical poverty and yet the spiritual wealth of the experience, and I suggested it might be good to publish this in Scotland. I have long-standing connections with various newspapers , and the Sunday Post was interested in the story. They did a full page piece, along with photos sent to them (electronically, of course) from Australia, and this raised a substantial contribution to Mother Teresa’s funds. I also managed to get more sponsorship here for Janie which was again predicated on a Scottish girl with connections here doing good work internationally.

If it had not been for Facebook I would never have known about this person or effort , but once on my radar, there was almost nothing I needed to do to help make money and information move around the globe. And, by the way ( as we say in Glasgow but probably not in Perth WA) if you want to know more about Janie Gribben O’Reilly and her work with Mother Teresa’s organization , contact her through Facebook - type in my name and look for my friend list.

Since then I deliberately expanded my friend list. The joy of this is that you can spend as little or as much time with contacts. Though they’re called friends and some of them are real friends, the reality is they can be anything from your nephew (got him – Welwyn Garden City) to a business acquaintance you once met at a dinner. Chat can be by an instant messenger thing in real time, or a private e-mail , or a Post as it’s known – you put a comment or some info on your Wall so everyone can see it. I post the link to this blog on every week on Facebook.

Now you may think that you are a hard-working lawyer and don’t have time for such frippery and dawdling. You’d be wrong. And while the purely social aspect is a matter of personal availability, choice and interest, the little click that went off in my brain after the Gribbenfest was a commercial one.

I have a group of 68 friends so far. Not that I talk to each one each day. Some I don’t speak to from week to week. Some days I am not on FB at all. But there is work to be had, and awareness to raise. Not only have I had direct work instructed by FB friends, but I have put one friend in touch with another to make common cause – in Celtic music would you believe. Ok, no direct consideration to me, but I have always tried to build my business on goodwill, osmotic connections and being in people’s minds – whether by mass media broadcast or print, or by personal connection. Hell, you’ve all been doing that in the private sector, even if it by just being a name and face at the golf club. Same process, different buttons.

But it is so immediate, so direct, and so cheap ( actually free ). And the potential is vast. Last week I saw a report that an estate agent ( Inksters, solicitors and estate agents led by the forward-looking Brian Inkster – and what a fabulous name) are advertising their properties on Twitter. Genius. And I can post legal information , links to our own website, snappy bits of advice on FB every hour of every day if I wish. My Firm blogger-in-law Mike Dailly is already ahead of the curve ( as ever ) and tells his vast cadre of FB friends of work he is doing at the Scottish Parliament, with BBC investigative teams, at university, or Posts about developments in that world of his that straddles politics and law. And another friend , a sole practitioner, has over 2,000 friends.

Last week at the Law Society of Scotland Council conference and meeting, our new chief exec Lorna Jack ( now a FB friend, naturally) gave us a presentation taken from Youtube that dramatically statisticised the exponential growth and speed of techno change, making the essential point that legal practice as we know it is itself evolving, and we need to keep our eye on it and seek to keep pace with it so it does not become a runaway horse.

Some reading will already be on that horse, but if you’re not, please get moving, or else you’ll be left trudging behind. With an evil-smelling bucket.

www. facebook.com - join up and find Austin