ABA Annual Meeting - Panel Discussion - The Only Thing That Matters - Your Professional Reputation

Due largely to the Internet, there is growing importance being placed on lawyers’ reputations based on the increased transparency of their actions, their character, and the way in which others perceive them. The Internet can be both a blessing and a curse for lawyers in that their reputations are now on full display to prospective buyers of their services — every win, every loss, and every personal blemish is laid bare for the world to see. Today, a considerable cost of any business transaction is assessing the reputation of your potential business partner, and this ease of assessment will have a significant impact on the global economy.

Many lawyers will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for legal advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or rudimentary searches. As important, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective about who they wish to work with at a firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy. The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude; yet, over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry. The question we will explore is: what can lawyers do to manage and control their reputations?

I hope to arrange a discussion with all the panel members, in the near future, to get your insight on the topic and ideas for what would make the program most interesting to our audience.