Small Law Firms, Social Media, Solo Practitioners, Technology

This Week In Legal Tech: Is Reddit Worth It For Lawyers?

For lawyers in solo and small firms, Reddit is worth considering, according to legal technology columnist Bob Ambrogi.

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Reddit logo“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie sang way back in 1967. Pretty much the same is true of Reddit. In fact, the menu is quite a bit more varied than Alice’s ever was. On Reddit, you can find everything from cutesy pet photos to hard-core porn, from computer reviews to movie reviews, from political commentary to gaming tips.

But does it have anything useful to offer lawyers?

If you’re not familiar with Reddit, it is a site for sharing content and discussing topics of mutual interest. Users (called Redditors) share stories, links, images and videos. Users also engage in discussions about nearly any topic you can think of. Users vote up or down on all this shared stuff, so the most highly voted content rises to the top. All of this is organized into areas of interest called subreddits.

There among the countless and often quirky subreddits are quite a few that deal with law or law practice in one way or another. In fact, to join or even view one subreddit, appropriately called Lawyers, you must be a licensed lawyer and submit proof of your licensure. It has close to 2,500 members.

But then there are also such subreddits as laww, where posts can be of anything that is both law-related and cute (such as a kitten sleeping on law books or virtually any picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg), and lawyerjokes, where the jokes are horribly bad but mercifully few.

As to the value in all this, opinions vary. Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay, CEO of the Canadian Legal Information Institute, wrote on Slaw last December that Reddit was helping him get over his disappointment with Twitter. Reddit, he wrote, “may be a more interesting medium for sophisticated and productive online discussion than Twitter.” At the same time, however, he acknowledged that the law-related subreddits “seem to lack, well … lawyers, and are frankly not particularly vibrant.”

Simple Justice’s Scott Greenfield is far less charitable in his assessment of Reddit. In a subreddit called Bad Cop No Donut, he found a lawyer dishing out opinions. “Most of what he wrote was wrong,” Greenfield said. “Some was utterly chaotic. None was entirely accurate. And yet, the community crowned the one-eyed lawyer king.”

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When he visited the aforementioned Lawyers subreddit, Greenfield said, it made him cringe. “The comments bore a passing resemblance to the language of lawyers, even the occasional case citation, but it had the depth of a puddle. Lawyers, I supposed, who didn’t understand what they were talking about, but had plenty to say.”

One of the most popular law-related subreddits I found is legaladvice, with well over 100,000 subscribed readers and more than 1,000 actively online during my recent visit. As you can imagine, the questions are all over the place. They elicit plenty of answers, but there is no way of telling which answers, if any, come from actual lawyers, except in a few cases where the answerer self-identifies as one.

Another popular law-related subreddit, with some 45,000 subscribed readers, is called simply Law. It is described as a place for lawyers and non-lawyers to discuss the legal profession and interesting legal developments. A lot of what gets posted here are news stories about court cases and other legal developments. It is interesting for anyone who likes to follow general legal news, but not very practical.

At the other end of the popularity spectrum is CorporateLawyer, a subreddit that offers nothing but the insight that corporate lawyers aren’t big Reddit users. It has all of three posts and 10 readers. Other law-related subreddits are similarly dormant, such as MichiganLawyers, which has just one three-year-old post.

Somewhat to my surprise, given my propensities, is that a subreddit on Lawtech, which is for discussions about the uses of technology in the practice of law, has a low level of activity, with just 84 subscribers and hardly any recent posts.

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For subreddits that contain discussions and content that may be of actual value to a practicing lawyer, two stand out to me. Both the Lawyers subreddit mentioned above and a subreddit called LawFirm, which is intended for solo and small firm lawyers and has some 3,000 readers, are largely populated by lawyers seeking and giving advice on practice and practice-management issues.

On the Lawyers subreddit, some of the recent discussions were about dealing with professional setbacks, making CLE presentations, coping with a client’s death, and drafting a non-disclosure agreement. On the LawFirm subreddit, recent threads discussed when to refer out a client, the use of lead-generation services for personal injury cases, and how solos can find time to take vacations.

Scott Greenfield characterized these conversations as having the depth of a puddle. To my mind, that misses the point. What’s useful about these conversations isn’t their depth, but simply the ability to have them.

Solos especially, but also many small-firm lawyers, have no sounding boards. When they have a question – regardless of whether it is simple or sophisticated – they cannot just walk down the hall and bounce it off a colleague.

For many lawyers, discussion forums help fill that void. That is why many listservs such as the ABA’s SoloSez keep going strong year after year. Where else can a young lawyer turn to ask about how a solo takes a vacation?

So is Reddit worth it for lawyers? For lawyers in solo and small firms, it’s as worth it as other lawyer-focused discussion forums and listservs. The SoloSez listserv has 1,500 subscribers, according to its web page. The LawFirm subreddit has twice that many. As a kind of virtual water cooler where lawyers can ask questions and bounce around ideas, it can fill a spot missing in many small firms.

So if you’re a solo or small firm lawyer who’s been curious about Reddit, you might want to take Arlo’s advice and just walk right in.

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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