Nicole Black and Carolyn Elefant: LexBlog Interviews
Nicole Black is Of Counsel to Fiandach & Fiandach, publishes four legal blogs and writes a weekly article on law and technology for The Daily Record. Carolyn Elefant is the founder of the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant and the creator of MyShingle, a blog focused on solo and small firm practice. Nicole and Carolyn co-authored “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” and presented sessions at TechShow.
Kelliann Blazek: What is your interest in TechShow?
Carolyn Elefant: I’ve been coming the past three years. I spoke three years ago on tech issues for solo and small firms and this year we were invited to speak on topics related to social media. We both spoke about online presence and then I had another track on eMarketing.
Nicole Black: This is my second year and it’s probably my favorite conference to attend. It’s a great convergence of all the people in the legal tech space.
KB: What was your inspiration for the book you co-authored, “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier”?
NB: We wrote the book because we both participate in social media and think it can be a really effective tool for lawyers to use in their practices. We set the book up so it would be approachable for both a novice and someone who has a basic understanding of social media.
CE: We also thought it was important to have a book that’s written by attorneys. There are a couple social media books and there’s some excellent websites about social media that we both follow, but lawyers tend to be very hesitant about borrowing ideas from other professions, often to their detriment. If we could break down a barrier by showing it from the perspective of lawyers, we thought that would be more effective.
KB: How do you both use social media in your own work?
NB: I primarily use social media to interact with other people and to learn and to disseminate information on the topics that are of interest to me, which is law and technology. It’s just a tool to connect and network with other people and I find it to be really a great tool.
CE: I do a lot of blogging so that is my main way of communicating through social media. I use it sometimes to disseminate information about either my blog site or sometimes if there is a decision of interest in my field of practice I will send out information about that. Also, again, to connect with colleagues in different places and interact, because as a solo I don’t have any people that work on site with me. To be able to have conversations throughout the day or interact with people kind of made a case against the isolation of being solo.
