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Networking on LinkedIn For Lawyers and Other Professionals

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LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 80 million members and growing rapidly. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals. LinkedIn is populated by thousands of business professionals including more than 387,000 CEO’s alone. By adding the contacts you already have to your LinkedIn account you will learn that you have 2nd and 3rd connections to many business professionals that you were unaware of.

Example of how LinkedIn can help you secure referrals and new clients.  For example, someone searches LinkedIn for a 'lawyer' and they see that they have a 2nd connection with you, meaning they know someone who knows you. Now they can contact their contact and ask about you, they contact you and now you received a referral without much effort on your part.

Here are a few advantages for lawyers and staff that LinkedIn has laid out:

  • Attracting proper public exposure helps potential clients find you.
  • Connect with past clients, colleagues, etc. Ensuring that your LinkedIn network truly represents your “real-world” relationships helps your exposure, and makes you more likely to appear in search results.
  • Maintain a rich public profile that displays your specific areas of expertise, prominent cases and matters handled, etc. This helps prospective clients searching for attorneys with a specific background & expertise find you in search results.
  • Manage your reputation in a credible, professional manner.
  • Who you’re connected to is a signal of your relationships, and influential figures who you have a trusted relationship with can help you project added credibility.
  • Recommendations on your profile speak to the actual experience past colleagues and clients have had working with you.
  • Find relevant information and experts when you need them.
  • Performing a people search by keywords can turn up the right expert (even in obscure technical areas) willing to lend his/her expertise.
  • Posting a question gets you answers or recommendations on experts in a specialized field from your network.

I have only named a few ways that LinkedIn can benefit you but there are many more uses for this program, you can visit http://learn.linkedin.com/ to learn about them. Getting started is easy, go to www.linkedin.com sign up and start searching for people that you know, you can add them by hitting the “connect” button.

Daniel Cherrin

DANIEL CHERRIN |served the City of Detroit as its Communications Director and the Press Secretary to Detroit Mayor, Ken Cockrel, Jr. He is a public relations + affairs specialist who just happens to be a lawyer, with 20 years of experience providing senior public relations and government relations’ counsel to organizations on state and federal regulatory and legislative matters, as well as issues affecting corporate and individual reputation, crisis management and the media. Daniel is the founder of NORTH COAST STRATEGIES (Est. 2005) an independent public relations consultancy that combines the best of a big agency with hands-on executive-level experience and support. As a signatory company to the United Nations Global Compact, we are dedicated to addressing issues around human rights, labor, the environment, and anti-corruption. We are also focused on redefining your brand and changing the conversation to create an impact.