The NJCCA in Cyberspace - Online Professional & Social Networking For Lawyers: Utilizing LinkedIn and Martindale Connected

Eugene Weitz

The NJCCA maintains a Chapter website on the Association of Corporate Counsel website at http://www.acc.com/chapters/njcca where we maintain this Chapter Newsletter.  If you have not gone beyond the Newsletter, certainly surf our site as well as the separate features maintained by the ACC.  The NJCCA is not stopping its presence in cyberspace there.  With the growth of online communities as a means of networking, career development and as a research tool for the substantive provision of legal advice and other useful business information, the NJCCA has been developing an online social and professional networking strategy for your use. 

First, the NJCCA recently established our own LinkedIn group at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1590257&trk=hb_side_g.  Currently, this group is limited to in-house practitioners so when visiting, feel free to request an invitation if you qualify as a member.  In addition to developing a LinkedIn network with other NJCCA members, we hope you will be interested in participating in online discussions on topics of interest to our community.  Also, members can post job opportunities at your companies or inquire about jobs and post similar professional/social oriented information as well. We are looking for your creativity to decide how we utilize LinkedIn.

Further, the NJCCA has been working with Martindale Connected in order to develop a robust community that provides not only the means for social networking, but professional networking as well.  Martindale Connected can be found at http://www.martindale.com/join.aspx?ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fcommunity.martindale.com%2fdefault.aspx, you can register now for Connected if you are interested in joining Connected ahead of our group going live at the 2009 NJCCA All Day Conference.  It is our intent to develop our Martindale Connected group as an information access and sharing hub for the NJCCA.  We will detail our suggestions how you can use our Connected community later but the underlying objective will be to provide a home for you to talk to your NJCCA colleagues regarding the practice of in-house law, issues regarding the law and anything else on your mind.  For example, we will initiate sub-groups for each NJCCA Committee so they can formulate their own private blog.  As we recognize the need to protect client confidentiality, privilege and data privacy we are developing the site in a manner that facilitates conversation but accommodates your professional requirements.  Bottom line we will create a tool for you to communicate with others about the practice of in-house law in New Jersey and it will be for all of us as NJCCA members to decide how we use it.

If anyone is interested in working with the NJCCA team on these initiatives (or any new ones), please contact Eugene Weitz at Eugene.Weitz@gmail.com.