Tipping point for legaled and social media?

This spring’s legaled conferences in the UK did not make huge waves on social media, although the subject associations are getting a (patchy) grip. Here’s a round up of some more recent law events.

Re the link bait title, it’s my view we’re still at the pockets of innovation stage, learning how the tools can be used to best effect. On which note it’s well overdue that I took a look at my data…

Update, 7 October: the OxIS 2013 report finds that social networks are plateauing. If this is as good as it gets, the case for professional top down support is clear.

ICAIL 13: XIV International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, 10-14 June, Rome

Not much action around ICAIL 13 – substantive events are generally still patchily tweeted. This is a shame, particularly given all those exciting looking workshops, not least the one on #sna – wot no slides at all? No doubt extensive digging about would yield some info, but it’s an opportunity missed.

A committee style report subsequently found via the Legal Informatics Blog, plus Adam Wyner’s text analysis presentation and Radboud Winkel’s presidential address, a look at ICAIL 1987-2013, lots of lovely data and a possible model for other long running conferences.

CALIcon13: Conference for Law School Computing, 13-15 June, Chicago

Some assembly still required at CALIcon13, but steps forward taken with livestreaming of sessions using YouTube Live Events (see CALI’s YouTube channel | playlist wanna discuss quality?) and 2.2K+ #calicon13 tweets. Ironically though, there are issues around this scale of activity in terms of making conference content more accessible and usable. After you’ve felt the width, what’s left?

No liveblogging sighted and no ongoing curation/collation orwrap-up. Resources have been added to some sessions, although there’s no way of knowing which. Plus don’t overlook the basics – eg hashtag on home page…

With 300+ participants (inc ~65 librarians) you’d expect some bottom up curation to help with sensemaking, and a Topsy search brings up 12 session reports from @jkbeitz and a Storify from @ebarney. On the podcast (see below) @debgpi mentioned that Storify can be a useful resource to go back to – have to say I’ve never thought of it that way, seems much more of a news! now! type thing (STLV). See this Twitter exchange.

Missing from the programme were two themes, although both may have come up more informally. On the use of social media within learning and teaching, neither Finding + tuning social signals (general intro) or Finding your inner Veronica Mars (who she? social meida as evidence) tackled the issue head on. Secondly, any MOOC moment was confined to How to create a distance education course.

Law School Tech Talk on 2 July discussed #calicon13 and related issues. I enjoy this podcast as it comes from such a different place – for example, host David Dickens appears not to have heard of MOOCs. Gasp. He doesn’t tweet, but is on G+ and enjoyed spending time watching the vids of people he knows.

Jonathan Ezor (@ProfJonathan) highlighted an analysis of the #calicon13 stream from SocialPing (costs), showing unique reach in 100,000s on Friday, with the second highest reach?? from @StephKimbro, who wasn’t even at the conference – a useful indicator for the ROI of social media, signal:noise ratio and diminishing returns notwithstanding? Don’t think DD was convinced. Generally there seemed to be a tentative approach to social media and trying out new tools, wonder why…litigious US law students maybe?

I bypassed Saturday’s grandly named Symposium on Justice, Lawyering and Legal Education in the Digital Age (programme), which has given rise to a stream if not ocean of blog posts, again calling for some sort of sensemaking and alternative forms of presentation and navigation.

To mine the #calicon13 archive see the archive | summary statistics | search | conversation – it’s not all chat one liners and selfies!

ReInvent Law London, 14 June

The same issue of too much data arose from ReInvent Law London – the #reinventlaw archive (archive | summary statistics | search | conversation), up to big data levels with 3K+ tweets, but with livetweeting from @LexisNexisUK (use search filter to access) and an ace report by Brian Inkster it’s rather easier to get an overview and hone in on what might be of interest. Vids also to be up soon on the ReInvent Law Channel (what is it w vids?).

Interestingly, some blog tennis took place prior to the event, which is not noted anywhere: Why ReInvent Law needs to be reinvented | Lawyers need more money (apparently).

I’ve written about ReInvent Law before – see my posts on #ReInventLawDubai and on LawTechCamp London, and Storifys too. The event attracted a lot of coverage but little sensemaking.

Two ends of the spectrum: