Laura Bergus

For my loyal subscribers, who are willing to show up here for one post every six weeks (c’mon, it’s really just my résumé disguised as a blog), I want to highlight my contributions elsewhere: I write twice a month over at Lawyerist (here’s a link to just my posts there). The many other fine writers at Lawyerist provide a steady stream of advice about law practice and legal marketing for law students, new lawyers, and seasoned practitioners.
But the seriously humongous peacock feather in my online identity cap is the Legal Geekery podcast. About once per month, Josh Auriemma and I yuk it up via Skype and record the conversation. I’ve never met Josh, but I know him better than even some of my closer law school friends. We cover law school, legal news, a bit of gossip, and many of Josh’s “funny stories.” Perhaps best of all, a bona fide awesome artist volunteered to “chibify” Josh and me for the podcast album art. US News was nice, but having someone use my likeness in an X-Files parody pic? *That* makes me feel cool.

Today the controversial US News law school rankings dropped (well, ok, they’ve been leaked online for a few days…). I’m not going to comment on the ridiculousness of the rankings and how they distort what would otherwise be a competitive system. I’m just going to point out that there’s a picture of me in the current issue of US News. :) There’s also a rather awkwardly-worded quote at the end, about the importance of following and commenting on blogs (something I’ve been preaching for a while). In any case, I’ll take the publicity. After all, this is print, and it’s print that reaches thousands of men over the age of 50. Ooooh.

Several people have asked me how I happened to end up in a national magazine, so here’s the story:

In February I got an email and follow-up call from Jessica Rettig, US News reporter, who had found me online through Legal Geekery (go Josh!). She and I talked twice, at length, about how law students can use social media to connect with experts in their interest areas, present themselves as intelligent humans, and maybe even discover a meaningful career. Obviously that story won’t sell as many magazines as the “OMG law school is ’spensive and there are no jobs!!!!1″ story that I ended up being quoted in, but such is the media business.

In March US News flew a photographer out from Maryland. To my house. In Iowa. The photographer was Jeffrey MacMillan, a first-class news veteran (note the pictures of presidents, senators, etc. on his website…) who’s now focusing on helping colleges and universities visually promote themselves. (So, any law schools out there who might want alumni coverage in the DC area, drop him a line.) He spent the day with my daughter and me, taking pictures for about five hours. Being a good photojournalist, he’d done some research on me and had even watched some of the video I directed about homelessness in Iowa, and was impressed with the quality of my video work. That little tidbit made my day. He also had great stories of campaign coverage and politics in Washington. When we went to Iowa City’s famous Hamburg Inn for lunch, he pointed to Bill Clinton’s official presidential portrait on the wall and said, “I had lunch with the guy that took that just the other day.” Very cool.

This is a social media success story. (Thanks to my Twitter friend Omar Ha-Redeye for pointing that out, clichéd as it may be.) If nothing else, it’s evidence of the point that most journalists start with Google, and if you’ve made any kind of SEOed name for yourself in a particular field, they can, and will, find you online.

The Association of American Law Schools’ annual conference is happening now in New Orleans. I’m in Iowa, and it’s cold. While I had no idea where my legal education would take me when I entered law school in 2008, my mind was filled inspiring opportunities after seeing what was happening on the tech side of legal education at the 2009 CALI conference. I met a lot of great people last summer, and have stayed in touch with many online. Most of them, and many more progressive and aggressive educators, librarians and technicians are in Louisiana this week. Wish I were there. I’ll be following #aals and #aals2010 on Twitter. Any attendees are invited to send some warm weather, great music, fabulous food, and/or job opportunities my way! :)

Anyone who knows me (and apparently career services-types who read their email newsletters) knows that I got my 1L job through Twitter and this here blog. There a lot of reasons why social media, and Twitter in particular, is good for finding a job. Just last week, I got a DM from one of my online heroes asking if I was looking for a job this summer. That’s a nice surprise when you’ve been kicking yourself, even just a little bit, for saving yourself some grief by deciding not to participate in OCI.

Here are two recent Twitter experiences that made my life easier and, most importantly, made me realize that there are people out there, and they are listening:

• Bluebooking nightmare. After complaining about some inexcusably lame Bluebooking problem I was having, a few lawbrarians (@richards1000, @stephdavidson, @hmorrell) immediately jumped to my rescue on Twitter. That led to a conversation about my love for law librarians (more on that in the recent Legal Geekery podcast, episode 2), and accolades for one of my school’s key librarians, who I then emailed and encouraged to join Twitter. If you want to follow what more law librarians are doing, find links here.
• Babysitting assistance. Last night my niece and nephew spent the night, visiting my daughter. After putting the little ones to bed, I was up with the 11 year-old and a promise that she could use my computer for some online flash games. Problem with that was that I never play online games (although that may change now…). I quickly Googled “circle the cat,” a game my husband is fond of. That entertained for a few minutes, but then I tweeted for help. In just a few minutes, shortened links were pouring in. Here are a few we enjoyed:
  • Chronotron
  • Double Wires
  • Cow Maze
  • Yeti Sports
  • Boomshine

I appreciate what Twitter does for me, and I know I’m not alone.

In preparation for CALICON09 (and an awesome session with John Palfrey), I’m creating a website to share the Social Media Best Practices document I’ve been working on between classes and finals over the past few months. The document will include recommendations for students, law school staff/administrators and employers on using social media (with advice for staff and employers primarily focused on relating to students and graduates by using social media). To mix it up a bit, I’ve included short video clips for each of the sections. A special sneak preview of the students section is here for your enjoyment/ridicule. I’m really interested to hear responses to my advocacy of social media for positive use by students. Note I don’t say anything about the risks. What do you think?

CALICON09 is happening June 18-20 at Colorado’s law school in Boulder.  CALI, known to every law school in the country (save a few, like mine), is a place where law students learn and professors share, using modern internet technologies.  One of the sessions at the conference this year will be presented by Harvard’s Berkman Center’s Co-director John Palfrey, author of the recent book about “digital natives,” Born Digital.  (Palfrey will is also the conference’s keynote speaker.)  The session will focus on how law schools can get smart about social media, from giving advice to students to addressing serious privacy concerns.  My law school’s assistant dean, Steve Langerud, and I were invited to join in the conversation and share our experience at the University of Iowa College of Law in creating a social media best practices plan.  (See Berkman fellow Gene Koo’s blog post about the workshop.)

The hope is to leave the conference with a working model for a social media plan that can be implemented for incoming students this fall. The best case will be schools setting up students, instructors and employers with meaningful advice and tutorials for productive social media use. The worst case, short of outright rejection by nostalgic administrators, will hopefully be careful and introspective critiques of the pros and cons of social media use by students, administrators and employers.

Thanks to Austin Groothuis at CALI for noticing Iowa Law’s project and to Gene Koo for connecting us with Berkman in this process.

If you’re going to CALI, I would love to see you there! Check out the CALICON whiteboard for details about a tweetup on the Friday evening of the conference.

In case you missed my earlier posts on Social Media Law Student about this project, please check out Part 1 and Part 2 there.

The gap in knowing the answer to “Why Facebook?” between those who use social networking and those who don’t is painfully illustrated in the chambers discussion between the juror who tweeted and updated his status on Facebook during the Fumo corruption trial. Juror Eric Wuest, put on the spot by the judge and defense attorneys, said Facebook (endearingly called “Facepage” by the judge for the first several minutes) was a journal for his thoughts, having no target audience and seeking no direct replies. Those of us who have used social networking know that he’s right: very often we will share our state of mind, an experience of the day or our feelings for others without regard for who will or might read them. Occasionally such posts are a call for action, response or even for help, but these are the exception rather than the norm. Hearing a defense attorney suggest that the Facebook update “Eric Wuest is thinking ‘what if?’” was somehow intended for the audience of the 600,000+ members of Philly’s FB network and that it was somehow identifiably connected to the Fumo trial is laughable.

It’s clear from what Wuest says that he’s not a blogger (although he did have an out-of-date anonymous blog (for which his profile has been hidden since I first looked on 3/17 and where he identified himself as pscyho, all in good fun)) and doesn’t use social media very often. In fact, he sounds like an average, relatively passive user, citing only a handful of Twitter followers and noting that the “game” of Facebook is to friend anyone who you might recognize, just to see who can get the most. He also said the blogs he reads are “joke blogs,” with animals doing funny things or people in strange situations. My heart broke a little for him a little knowing that saying “Oh, nothing related to the case, it’s just FAILblog and I can has Cheezburger!” would get him nowhere with the crowd in the judge’s chambers.

In the end, luckily, justice prevailed. Wuest was escorted out of the room after defending his innocuous posts and the judge and attorneys debated Wuest’s credibility as well as the probability of mistrail-level risks involved with such internet use by a deliberating juror. For the record, the state’s attorney advised, “[Using Facebook like this is] a new thing for us older people, but it’s what everyone is doing.” In response the judge said, “And they’re doing it to a ridiculous extreme…No doubt this is a very important issue.” Speaking to the nature of Wuest’s answers during the discussion, the judge said Wuest was “Just like any other witness. Some of the answers might not be totally accurate…[But to warrant a mistrial] there has to be a prejudicial aspect to this.” He continued to say that Wuest was just the kind of juror you want: one conscientious guy, “more aware of [his duties] than I would ever imagine a juror being” and trying to do the right thing. The judge denied the defense’s motion to remove Wuest from the jury and Wuest continued in the deliberations.