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How useful/necessary is LinkedIn for lawyers? Thanks in advance.

lawhopeful10 wrote:How useful/necessary is LinkedIn for lawyers? Thanks in advance.

Not very useful or necessary. The main benefit for me is looking at people's profiles that I will be interviewing with as part of interview due diligence.

It is good for keeping track of people you know/have worked with. Also good for looking at others' profiles to see their work history and what they did to get to where they are now. Other than that, I think it is such BS that they advertise it like you will get a job from it.

I use it to stalk people - e.g. figure out what my classmates are doing, find people doing a job I'm applying for and look at their qualifications, etc. You see all these things saying "join groups on LinkedIn!" so I did, and oh. my. god. I have never seen such useless self-promotion and stupid conversation in my life. Makes TLS look like an online forum for Nobel prize winners (I mean, ALL of TLS, not just the good bits).

It's an extremely thinly veiled recruiting tool. I've gotten a fair number of unsolicited inquiries from recruiters via my profile.

For lawyers, I think it's also slowly displacing the law firm bio, to the extent clients ever rely on such things. It's a lot easier to update a LinkedIn profile than to get the firm bio updated.

I enjoy Linkedin, but I wouldn't call it useful or necessary.