A new study has revealed that many large law firms in Australia are not providing social media training for staff. A Thomson Reuters study of more than 100 senior legal practitioners across Australian firms during October found that a lack of clear strategy in the use of social media could cause a raft of problems in the future for those firms.
According to the study 75 percent of those questioned used social media in a professional capacity, but just 39 percent of firms offered any kind of formal training for using social networks, and 24 percent didn’t have any central social media strategy in place. A further 65 percent admitted that there were people in their firm actively using social media who didn’t fully understand how the platforms worked.
In fact, 13 percent of respondents said they had frequently seen colleagues, peers or contacts sending Twitter Tweets that they deemed “unprofessional”, while 33 percent of respondents said they saw this behaviour occasionally. The survey also revealed a raft of fears towards social media. Almost 75 percent of legal practitioners said they were afraid of saying the wrong thing, 52 percent said they were concerned they’d make the firm sound unprofessional while 36 percent said their fear was exposing confidential or sensitive company information.
Of those who didn’t actively use social media professionally, 41 percent claimed it was because they were risk-averse, 30 percent said they didn’t have time and 27 percent said they didn’t have the technical nous.
Those that did engage in social media predominantly used it for networking (63 percent), positioning the firm as forward-thinking (48 percent), generating leads and business development (40 percent ). “Social media is not going away anytime soon, and as our research shows, a huge proportion of law firms are now waking up to the very real benefits it presents,” said commercial director at Thomson Reuters, Carl Olson. “However, what’s most concerning is the fact that staff training and development, not to mention marketing strategy, has not caught up yet. This means firms are exposing themselves to unnecessary risks.”
Thomson Reuters is the publisher of this website.
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