Today's Lawyers Must Be Mindful of Social Media and Pretrial Publicity
Des Moines attorney Charles Kenville has a great post on the need for lawyers to be mindful of the new media exposure in their cases. Chuck has a criminal law bent to his post but his reminder is just as true for civil cases.
I know from experience that savvy businesses are acutely aware of blogs and other social media in their trial preparation. In particular, Microsoft did a great job a staying in contact with Des Moines patent attorney Brett Trout and I when the Microsoft-Iowa litigation was going full steam. But the plaintiffs were not to be outdone. We routinely received updates from the plaintiffs' public relations team as well.
The bottom line is that lawyers engaging in trial law today ignore blogs and social media at their peril. Learn how to read RSS feeds to stay on top of pretrial publicity. You will be glad you did.
