I was something of a late Twitter adopter on my Legal Geekery persona.  I didn’t really understand how it could benefit me professionally.  Now I urge all law students to get a Twitter account as fast as possible.  Why?  That’s the easy part.

There are roughly 1000 people following @legalgeekery.  I’d guess that the breakdown is along the lines of 500 attorneys, 300 law students, 100 0Ls, and 100 randoms (geeks, foodies, other cool people, etc).  I don’t use any spammy techniques to acquire followers, so my connection to my Twitter followers is quite strong: I care about what they tweet, and presumably they care about what I tweet.

Research

Twitter can easily be used as a research tool with the right following.  For instance, I was recently writing a paper for my IP licensing class comparing license agreements of social networking sites and I kept seeing sections requiring the user to be 13 or above.  I knew why this requirement was necessary at some point, and was fairly certain that it was statutory, but I don’t remember the name of the Act.  I couldn’t find the answer via Google or Lexis, so I decided to send out a tweet asking if anyone had any idea why this age limit was set in place.  Within a few minutes, I had the following answers:

COPPA, of course, is the statute that I was trying to find.

Networking

Let’s face it –  there are only a finite number of in-person networking opportunities available to law students during the semester, and at these events, you (okay, I) meet a maximum of 20 people or so.  That’s not bad, but consider that I “meet” about 20 people per day on Twitter.  These aren’t useless contacts, either.  They’re people in the field who have experience and connections, who arguably know me better than some person with whom I spoke for 10 minutes at a dinner event.

Another interesting thing to point out is that Twitter people come from every walk of the law.  I have prosecutors, defenders, biglaw people, and solo practitioners on my list.  It’s great to be able to approach people about their field and have them be totally candid.

Legal News

If you acquire enough law-related followers, you’re going to be exposed to breaking law-related news as it happens.  Looking through my timeline, I see over 30 links to law-related articles and news stories tweeted within the last 20 minutes.

Another neat idea that I use is to set up a search using a twitter client like Tweetdeck that will alert you whenever someone tweets about your law school.  I’ve found quite a few Penn State Law tweeters this way.

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Hopefully you decide to take the plunge and make yourself a Twitter account.  Don’t forget to add @legalgeekery when you do — we’ll be honored to be your first friend!

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3. Courtney Love Sued for Tweeting
4. Laptops in the Classroom: Learning Tool or Time Waster?