New Social Networking Site for Law Students: Good Idea, Needs Participants
Mar 25th, 2009 | By Josh Camson | Category: Featured, Law School, Lead Article, Social Networking
Almost everyone I know is now on Facebook. That includes my family, my co-workers and so forth. It has become difficult to manage any meaningful relationships via Facebook, let alone meet new people interested in similar things. That is why I really like the idea of Advanced Advocates. It is a new social networking site designed for and open exclusively to law students.
Unfortunately, the site is still too new for me to get much value out of it. At the time of this writing there were 38 people on the site, including myself and the creator of the site. However, if the site can build up its user base, it could become a powerful resource for law students.
Advanced Advocates boasts a number of interesting features. I particularly like the idea of users submitting case briefs. The site has a very long list of cases, presumably drawn from the cases covered in most casebooks. From there, students can edit the case briefs in a wiki. Once a community gets started, this would be an amazing tool for any student. We have all been in class and whether or not we did the reading, we just aren’t positive about one of the cases. Having Advanced Advocates open to the case brief would be a great help.
The site also supports a ranking system for clerkships. I initially thought it was just for judicial clerkships, but it seems to allow the user to enter any employer and rank them. It was unclear whether the reviews will be anonymous. If they are, will people go over-the-top to smear a former employer? If not, will there be any incentive to even hint at the negatives of a current employer? If Advanced Advocates can figure out a good middle ground, this would be a tremendous resource during OCI.
The other feature I am excited for is the outline database. In my opinion, it has the potential to be the best part of the site. A comprehensive database of outlines searchable by subject area and school would be helpful for many. However, there seems to be little incentive to go through the pain of uploading your outlines, beyond helping your fellow law school sufferers. There are sites that operate on a “upload one, download one” policy, forcing users to contribute before they can benefit from the site. With little incentive, I don’t have high aspirations for this portion of the site going far.
In addition to its lack of membership, the site has a few design flaws. First of all, users can only sign up with a law school e-mail address. I see the logic here, but it is still a pain. Luckily, once you sign up you can change your preferred address. The notifications system is also very limited. When someone writes on your wall a “note” on your profile you are not notified of who did the writing, only what it said. There is no way to upload your contacts or log into your webmail to search for people you may already know on the site. Finally, users are not notified when someone accepts them as a friend.
Overall, this site has a lot of potential, but needs a dedicated base of members and some slight back-end changes. Head over to http://advancedadvocates.com and give it a try.
Let us know what you think of the site in the comments.
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Great idea guys – I will also push on Foolkit and RT. to students. Good story to post.
Cheers.
Nick
FKL
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admin
Reply:
March 26th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Thank you. Your students may be more familiar with web 2.0 than most others.
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Thanks for this post. I am an Illinois Institute of Technology student conducting usability testing on a website called Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), http://www2.cali.org/, and the law students that tested the site for me may find this interesting and useful. I will send the link to them.
Kelly
[Reply]
admin
Reply:
March 26th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Thank you Kelly. I am familiar with CALI. I used the service a few times but then basically forgot about it. Perhaps if it was integrated with some type of social network to keep students coming back would help.
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I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Joannah
http://2gbmemory.net
[Reply]
admin
Reply:
March 26th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Thanks Joannah. We hope you find something useful here.
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[...] author at the Social Media Law Student blog, had some nice things to say about Advanced Advocates in his recent post. After working for several months on the site, it’s fabulous to have a tech savvy student [...]
I’m on it, add me. They rock.
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[...] author at the Social Media Law Student blog, had some nice things to say about Advanced Advocates in his recent post. After working for several months on the site, it’s fabulous to have a tech savvy student like [...]
It is a useful piece of information. Great post. Thanks.
Stephanie
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Were did you find these informations?
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Hi, I just came across your website and was wondering if you can direct me to where I can obtain the requiremnets for a personal goal statement for law school. I need to know what font to use, margin settings, etc. thanks
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Josh Camson
Reply:
May 14th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Benita,
This information will vary from law school to law school. I would recommend contacting that law school’s office of admissions and see what they recommend.
[Reply]
[...] 17. New Social Networking Site for Law Students: Good Idea, Needs Participants [...]
[...] The plug for the social network should probably have been given during law school so students could better network with their peers. To my knowledge, this was the first time I ever received an email about Martindale-Hubbell Connected. If Lexis, Westlaw, or the American Bar Association (to name a few) want to be the gold standard in providing the legal community with a social network, they will need to do a better job finding an audience. [...]
Thanks for this post. Quite useful for all of us.
Misty
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