Be careful who your friends are

At Sam Glover’s behest, I have been experimenting with social networking sites such as Linked In and Facebook. Both sites urge you to find your “friends” and “connections” so that you can expand your network and uncover untold riches (they really are untold).
So you dutifully go about searching for people you know, inviting them to be your friends, and then in turn look at their friends to see who you may know in common. It’s much easier to find friends by looking at other people’s lists than it is to just randomly type in names of people you know (like your buddy Jane Johnson). If you stick with these sites for a while, you’ll periodically get waves of e-mails of people you know who have just joined and are themselves trying to expand their networks.
For lawyers, creating these on-line friendship circles raises some interesting questions about who should be your friends. For example, do lawyers want their clients to be their “friends?”
From a networking perspective, this could be a great boon to a lawyer’s practice. Become “friends” with your clients (with their permission, of course, because the client may prefer that you keep his or her identify confidential under Rule 1.6 of the Rules of Professional Conduct), and then all of the client’s friends can see who the client’s lawyer is, or provide a prospective client with yet another means of checking you out. Your social network page may even drive clients to your website through a convenient link on the social networking site.
Wait a second. Your clients are going to be your “friends?”







