LinkedIn endorsements may be good for the ego, but what they’re not good for is professional ethics. In a recent webcast on Lexblog, Megan McKeon, the senior marketing manager at Katten Muchin Rosenman explains why the legal industry needs to be wary of endorsing attorneys over the social media site.
“With the ABA model rules regulating what we as attorneys do for advertising and marketing it’s important for us to know that endorsements pretty much do run afoul of those model rules,” explains McKeon. According to Rachel Zahorsky in an ABA Journal story, ABA Model Rule 7.1 prohibits a lawyer from making a false or misleading claim about his or her services. The problem with LinkedIn, is that sometimes people will “endorse” the skill of a professional but have no first-hand experience with that person’s work. This is where lawyers can potentially run into problems, though the issue is not as black and white as the site itself. Zahorsky reports at least one professional ethics expert says just because an endorser doesn’t know the lawyer directly, doesn’t make it false.
However, McKeon takes the cautious approach. “Most of our attorneys, in pretty much every situation, should not be engaging with endorsements,” she told LexBlog.
Attorney Marlisse Silver Sweeney is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. Email: MarlisseSilverSweeney@gmail.com. Twitter: @MarlisseSS.
Whether securing a job or developing business, it’s always better to have an inside contact, especially someone high on the totem pole.
As Robert Ambrogi explains in a post on LawSites, LinkedIn is no longer the only business development option in town. Relationship Science, or RelSci, is quickly making a name for itself, Ambrogi says, claiming to employ more powerful mapping and searching tools and to have “far more information about prospects” than LinkedIn.
Launched last year, RelSci says it has more than 1 million organizations in its database—every public company across the globe, a number of private companies and, now, law firms, including several Am Law 100 firms. It also boasts of 3 million high-level decision-maker subscribers, including corporate counsel, nearly half of whom are not on LinkedIn, Ambrogi wrote.
“It works by mapping your contacts and those of others in your firm against its database of people and companies,” Ambrogi wrote, using Path Finder to determine how you’re connected and the strongest pathway to pursue.
Other features:
Advanced search filters for industry, interests, work history, education, investments, political contributions, etc.
Maps external relationships to find out which firms represent a company.
Daily customizable alerts by email when people and companies you know are mentioned in the news.
“Visit a City” lets you research who to meet with in advance of a business trip.
An individual subscription costs $3,000 a year.
Sherry Karabin is a freelance writer and reporter based in New York City. Email: sherry.karabin@yahoo.com.
