Politics, Technology

This Week In Legal Tech: The Facebook Phenomenon That Is 'Lawyers Of The Left'

A new organization of lawyers provides a glimmer of hope in a time of despair.

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Facebook_like_thumbOn election night, as results rolled in, many lawyers, like many in the population at large, fell into a stupefied state of shock. “Numb” is the word I heard many use to describe how they felt. But for many other lawyers, the election was a call to action.

One such lawyer is Traci Feit Love, a Harvard Law graduate and vice president of a legal marketing agency, 180 Legal. While her initial reaction, she later wrote, was despair, anger, fear and disbelief, by the next morning she began to see hundreds of Facebook posts from lawyers proposing positive action.

“I thought to myself: Why not create a small Facebook group where those action-minded lawyers could really start making a difference?” Love wrote.

Just before noon on the Wednesday morning after the election, she posted an invitation on Facebook to join a new group of like-minded lawyers who were not happy with the election outcome and wanted to contribute their knowledge, skills and support “towards a better future.”

She made the group invitation-only and named it Lawyers of the Left. That night, she began sending invitations more widely, hoping to grow the group to 150 members by the end of Friday. When she awoke Thursday morning, the group had already grown to 624. Thirty minutes later, it was 800. From there, it exploded.

By 9:30 p.m. on Friday, the group had grown to more than 60,000 members. Within a week, it swelled to over 100,000 members. As of this morning, there were close to 120,000 members. Its members represent every state plus at least 26 other countries.

Meanwhile, an organization has been taking shape. Lawyers of the Left now has a mission statement, a set of community guidelines, and even a media policy. Over the weekend, it set up a structure of subchapters – one for each state plus an international group – and is in the process of identifying subchapter leaders. It is creating committees to focus on specific issues. And it is beginning to explore funding options.

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So what will Lawyers of the Left do? Its overarching goal, as defined by its mission statement, is “to fight for a fair and just society, to defend the freedoms and privileges guaranteed by our Constitution, and to stand against those who would use the law to deprive others of their basic human rights.”

Specifics of how it will do that remain to be worked out. One immediate plan is to coordinate among members who will attend The Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017, the morning after the inauguration.

The group’s seeming overnight success has not been without at least a measure of controversy. Lawyer and blogger Brian Tannebaum resigned from the group (in his inimitable way) after a moderator reportedly refused to approve his post sharing a blog post he wrote about the election.

When the group’s moderators approved his post two days later, he wrote on Facebook, “So what? They are moderating content. That was my point. Let me know when they allow the free flow of speech. I’ll be right here.”

I share Tannebaum’s discomfort with the organizers’ decision to moderate comments, and I said as much in a comment I posted to the group, urging that moderation be done away with and that the group “let the ideas and discussion flow freely.” Personally, I tend to bristle when others want to tell me what I can or cannot say.

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Another criticism I’ve seen is that this Lawyers of the Left will detract from the work of other civil rights organizations, such as the original Lawyers of the Left, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Group members have also extensively debated the name, with some saying they support the group’s goals but do not consider themselves “of the left.”

Still, this phenomenon that is Lawyers of the Left, with its explosive growth of lawyers committed to working for justice and equal rights, provides a glimmer of hope in a time of despair. Rather than wallow in defeat, here are more than 100,000 lawyers ready and willing to take action. Just this weekend, liberal icon Robert Reich called on lawyers to “get organized.” Little did he know, many of them already have.

Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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