"Attorneys network with each other more than any other professional group, I believe," said Choi. "It's particularly important because the legal field is so specialized."
LawLink, which launched on August 24, "is the first online network exclusively for licensed attorneys" and "is 100% free for all attorney members," continues its website.
Similar websites include Lawbby.com and LinkedIn.com; however, Choi believes Lawbby is "more about social interaction," while LinkedIn isn't geared specifically enough towards attorneys. "I believe social networking sites are going to be going into niches."
"LawLink [also] verifies every profile by checking State Bar databases or by contacting the person to get some other kind of proof that they're a lawyer," explained Choi. Which is how Choi's team discovered that more than a dozen of their 1,000 collected profiles were fake.
But Choi remains optimistic.
"Online networking is probably about 1,000 times more powerful than offline networking," he said. "An attorney recently said to me, 'I don't want to have lunch with 10 attorneys; I just want to get work.' There's a reason why those social-networking sites [such as MySpace] are so gigantic. It makes interacting with your peers so easy."
