First it was the nerds. Then came the celebrities, hotly pursued by journalists. And now lawyers are catching on to the power of Twitter.
The legal world's equivalent of the prolific tweeter Stephen Fry is David Allen Green, a solicitor who combines his day job as head of media law at the City firm Preiskel & Co with a part-time role as the New Statesman's legal correspondent.
Green caught journalists' attention when he began tweeting and bloggingduring the Simon Singh libel case The secret of the 40-year-old's success appears to be combining lawyerly insight with a rather un-lawyerly outspokenness and irreverence. "I am hearing bullshit from [the former News International head of HR Daniel] Cloke and [News International's head of legal affairs Jon] Chapman," Green tweetedrecently, in reference to the hacking scandal, having earlier remarked: "But just imagine having Wendi Murdoch as a godmother..."
Lower key, but no less astute, is Adam Wagner, a junior barrister at 1 Crown Office Row who has used Twitter, in conjunction with the highly rated legal blog he edits, to become the one of the best-known young lawyers in the country – quite an achievement in a hierarchical profession where it is often frowned upon for rookies to seek publicity. Like Green, Wagner operates by tweeting a combination of blog links and pithy work-related musings. "I see at least one QC a week joining Twitter," he says. "But the hierarchy on the site is different to real life."
Other lawyers to have used the medium cleverly include Ashley Connick, a Leeds University graduate who landed a plum trainee job at one of the prestigious "magic circle" law firms partly on the back of his tweets about life as a wannabe solicitor, and barristers John Cooper QC and Felicity Gerry, whose Twitter presence has enabled them to disrupt the established order of legal media rent-a-quotes.
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