Social Networking And The Law
One of the points that Mike Dillon, GC of Sun Microsystems, made in his recent post, Change, is that the new generation of lawyers has a different perspective on the practice, which is helping drive change.
The career perspective of the newest generation of attorneys is an additional factor in driving these changes. They desire a different lifestyle than what was offered in the past. I know this from first hand experience. As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in a conference room with a number of our law school summer interns. They work differently than I did when I was in law school - collaboratively, in communal spaces, streaming music, while interacting with peers via Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. To many of them, flexibility, mobility, a collaborative environment and interesting work are paramount - and not always what law firms can currently offer.
Against that backdrop, I listened on my ride home tonight to a terrific NPR story on How Technology Divides Workers. Here is one of the points I found most interesting:
"You can have Gen Y-ers who are busy looking at their BlackBerrys. They've got their laptops flipped open, they're engaging in social networking right during the course of a meeting, and you have a boomer rolling their eyes, not understanding it," says Michael Walsh, the CEO for LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets. "Two-thirds of boomers that were surveyed indicated that they felt that use of devices, technology — such as e-mail, social networking, the Internet, etc. — contributed to a decline in office etiquette."
I am all for social networking--after all, I blog, I twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook and others. One of my kids even said I was cool. (Of course, you need to understand that right after he said that, he asked me to buy him a new PSP game.) And I multi-task too--the three screens in my office enable that practice. But in a meeting, when other people are investing their time, well, that's where I draw the line. Put the blackberrys and phones away. Be in the moment and give yourself to the moment. When everyone does that, the moment is likely to have value, which is, after all, the point of having the moment to begin with.
That's funny, not too long ago the Next Big Thing in productivity and office management was to stop holding so many pointless meetings, to stop managing your business like the boss from Dilbert.
Now Gen-Y is being attacked for anecdotal remarks about being addicted to technology, the same technology that the Boomers demand they be addicted to. Do you know what they call an associate who doesn't immediately answer the partner's Sunday afternoon emails? "Fired for performance reasons."
If a Boomer's response to inattention at a meeting is merely to "roll their eyes," then it's quite obvious that the Boomer himself thinks the meeting (or at least the associate's presence) is a waste of time, or else he'd complain right then and there.
Maybe the F2F meeting format is at the root? In a lot of cases F2F meetings are a big waste of time. People are aware of this. I suppose of people are investing their time (in a non-multitasking fashion) they want it to be respected. However, this is rarely the case in meetings. People come unprepared and with no real direction and it end up being just a replay of the hierarchy. So, perhaps for those types of meetings an online format that allows multitasking is best.
The challenge would then be that F2F meetings would actually need to be respectful of people's time. F2F meetings would necessarily need to be restricted to subject matters and instances when each and every person was thoroughly prepared to move a discussion forward in a peer-to-peer manner and all the meeting material was of high importance.
I personally like F2F meetings better generally and I invest my attention on whatever subject matter comes up. But, I have noticed most people really resent F2F meetings that do not really need their input.