Agree2 is a service that lets users fill out, sign and store agreements online, and Zak has uploaded the LexPublica Simple Mutual Confidentiality Agreement over there. Pelle, the developer of Agree2, will be adding the rest of our contracts soon. It’s a pretty neat service!

Slaw linked today to The Canadian Bar Association’s recently released Guidelines for Ethical Marketing Practices Using New Information Technologies (PDF). Overall the guidelines don’t say anything extraordinary; there’s great emphasis on behaving with integrity and in accord with all other guidelines and ethical standards related to lawyer communications in general. Though the overall tone of the piece is cautionary, the CBA does encourage participation with social media as a marketing tool:

“Any risks associated with having a presence on the Internet can be managed and are outweighed by the benefits. Providing the public with information about the type of work a law firm does and the areas of work of its lawyers is an important public service as well as a business opportunity.”

There’s one bone I have to pick, though. (I’m overlooking the authors’ inclusion of MySpace in a list of sites lawyers might use. Lawyers: MySpace is a relic. Don’t waste your time on it.)

Throughout the eleven-page document, the authors refer to many kinds of online participation as “advertising.” Now, advertising can certainly play an important role in a lawyer’s or law firm’s efforts to attract new clients and online advertising works very similarly to offline advertising: ads are purchased for display in a certain location for a certain length of time. It’s a one-way form of letting people know what you do.

Participating online, however, is by definition not advertising: online participation requires two-way communication.

Sure, you could use sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn just to broadcast your services. You could bombard people with messages like, “Need a lawyer? Pick me! Pick me!” But you’d be missing a tremendous opportunity, and beyond that you’d likely alienate yourself as someone who isn’t interested in engaging with people online. In the very real, very big, rapidly growing world of social media, engagement is what drives attention. (Engagement does not entail giving legal advice, the dangers of which are well outlined in the CBA’s Guidelines.)

The value of creating, growing and maintaining an online presence is in the relationships you develop with people. Real people. People who will want to know what you have to say about the law and lawyering because you make an effort to chat with them about things they want to know and because you’re an approachable expert in your area of practice.

Advertising has a very well defined place online. The rest can be called marketing, self-promotion, developing your personal brand, etc. But whatever you call it, it’s about interacting with people. And interacting goes two ways.

Martin and Zak had the pleasure of presenting to a group of lawyers at Davis LLP this afternoon; it was their first time addressing a roomful of lawyers about online communication tools and we thought we’d share the slides and notes we prepared.

In general, we focused on two major points:

• The internet is about relationships between people – something lawyers are already very good at developing
• The ways to build and maintain those relationships can feel very different online and it’s important to develop comfort with them now, when there’s room to make mistakes and learn and before it becomes an essential part of lawyering over the next five years or so

Here are the slides we used. After the jump, we’ve posted the presentation notes.