In 1999, The Firm knew of an Edinburgh practice that was still using typewriters. Others, such as Brian Inkster were quick to embrace the possibilities of new technologies, and he appears to be the first solicitor in Scotland to have joined the Twittering masses.

The Firm was first alerted to Twitter in November 2007 by marketing mistress Roisin Donnelly, who told us that tweets would shortly become as ubiquitous as texts, a claim that seemed outlandish at the time, but which proves that you should listen to anything Donnelly tells you, should you encounter her. One man with a business head that has always been metaphorically under the technological bonnet is Brian Inkster, whose all-embracing approach to e-volution saw him as one of the first solicitors to launch a firm website over ten years ago, as well as being the first in Scotland to utilise a web based digital dictation system, and the first estate agent to introduce the property information to text service. So adopting Twitter is very much in character.  He is however, keen to stress that it is all in service of pursuing a business advantage.

“It is a different way of communicating with clients and prospective clients,” he told The Firm.

“Unlike a traditional blog or a lot of news items, it is very short, only 140 characters, so it is something you can easily do. When I started using it I discovered I could use the twitter more as something from the firm rather than me as an individual. Through trial and error, it became obvious that the way to use it from a firm point of view was to really treat it as the firm speaking, and not Brian Inkster. But then I started using a separate Brian Inkster twitter, and I am more able on that to fire off comments about other things. I am more able to banter personally, and that has developed.”

The two strands of Inkster’s twitterings have now evolved into direct engagement with the firm’s clients. Inskters’ tweets provide frequently updated information to clients about the progress of property sales from the estate agency side of the business.
 
“Some of the estate agents in England have been listing properties on it, but I have not seen it in Scotland,” he says.

“It is another platform for people to find the properties we are selling and link through to the website. It allows them to click through and see more information on a property on the website. If someone who likes to twitter a lot might like the idea of following a property. When anything updates they are going to see it. For instance, we had a new property on the market yesterday, which one wouldn’t normally post as a news story on the firm’s website, but we could easily put on Twitter that we are valuing the property today, it will be listed shortly, and so on. They’ll follow it, and get more information than they would get traditionally in a little blast every now and again about what might be happening.”

Inksters’ eager embracing of the twitter phenomenon highlights a schism within the legal community, and across the chamber side in particular, where some firms have taken a firmer and faster grip of technology than others. Within those divisions, some have paid lip service to expensive technological solutions that have not necessarily translated themselves into sharper practice or greater revenue. And there are still some whose business models have remained unaltered since the .com revolution, and who remain stubbornly resistant to change even today.

“I think a lot of sole practitioners could be doing what I am doing. But they are not. We started off as a general practice, and the competition was from other general practitioners,” Brian Inkster says.

“A lot of firms still think like that: ‘I’m a lawyer, I do law. Why do I need a website’? As a business owner, you may not need every solicitor in your organisation to know about these things, but the people running the business should know the significance.”

And taking advantage of Twitter is, he argues, one strand of an approach that has the growth of the business as its principal aim.

“Because Twitter is a very immediate thing, and if you are updating it every day -which doesn’t take a lot of time-  it all links in to the website. Clients and prospective clients see what you are doing, and it all enhances the presence of the firm.”