Okay, I gotta admit that I’ve been skep­ti­cal about the value of Twit­ter. Lawyers tend to delude them­selves into believ­ing that they think impor­tant and deep thoughts. For exam­ple: “I just read an inter­est­ing arti­cle on res ipsa loquitur and its rela­tion­ship to the Philip­pines pro­bate code. Would you please pass the Chardon­nay and the shrimp tem­pura?” And let’s face it, how good are lawyers at being brief? Lawyers are almost con­gen­i­tally inca­pable of express­ing them­selves in 140 char­ac­ters or less.

But my army of mar­ket­ing con­sul­tants (er, all the mar­ket­ing dudes writ­ing on the Inter­net) says Twit­ter and Face­book have real busi­ness value for lawyers (every­one assumes lawyers are too anti-social to actu­ally use those sites for their orig­i­nally intended social pur­poses). So I’ve done some mod­er­ately care­ful look­ing at Twit­ter and have decided to jump on the band­wagon. Of course, now that I am on that band­wagon, I think Twit­ter is the great­est thing since sliced bread. Here it is, my but­ton so you can fol­low me on Twit­ter:

What am I Tweet­ing about (like most peo­ple above 23, I ini­tially asso­ci­ated the word “Tweet­ing” with some­thing that was drip­ping down my leg)? I have only been Tweet­ing a few weeks, so I am still get­ting my sea legs. But here is a list of things I have been and expect to be Tweet­ing about:

• Employment-related legal issues. This is the main area of my prac­tice, and most of my Tweets will be on this topic.
• Legal issues relat­ing to the med­ical indus­try (much of my employ­ment lit­i­ga­tion is in the med­ical industry).
• Other legal issues which I think may be of inter­est to my “fol­low­ers” (I feel the power cours­ing through my veins).
• Time man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tional skills. Like most lawyers and busi­ness peo­ple, I am always look­ing for ways to become more effi­cient, so I can spend more time con­cen­trat­ing on deep thoughts.
• Com­puter and soft­ware prod­ucts & issues that might be of inter­est to lawyers and busi­ness people.
• Media issues. I teach a class at Fair­mont State Uni­ver­sity on legal and eth­i­cal issues in media, and I am espe­cially inter­ested in media bias in gen­eral and specif­i­cally relat­ing to polit­i­cal coverage.

My Tweets will almost always con­tain a link to an Internet-based story or arti­cle, so the points is usu­ally to pro­vide peo­ple fol­low­ing me a brief expla­na­tion to an inter­est­ing arti­cle on the Inter­net (remem­ber, the 140 char­ac­ter limit).

Try­ing to put a mean­ing­ful mes­sage into 140 char­ac­ters (or less) is chal­leng­ing, but it reminds me that lit­i­ga­tion lawyers espe­cially should always think about how to sim­plify and shorten their mes­sage. Lawyers in prepar­ing for trial almost always think they need nine years to present their case to a jury, and judges almost always think the lawyer needs no more than 140 char­ac­ters. So lawyers have to shorten and sim­plify their mes­sage, and have to weed out all the extra­ne­ous garbage.

That need reminds me of one of my favorite books, and what is arguably the mother of all exam­ples of the need to con­dense and weed out—the gold-plated LP on the Voy­ager space­craft. The book is Mur­murs of Earth by Carl Sagan. In 1977 NASA launched two space­craft named “Voy­ager”, with the pur­pose of trav­el­ing past our solar sys­tem into the stars. Each space­craft con­tained a gold-plated long-playing record (in other words, an old “LP”). The LP was a “call­ing card” to alien beings who might one day find one of these space­craft. This book is by the peo­ple who were chiefly respon­si­ble for select­ing what went on that LP. Think about it. If you had the lim­ited space of an old LP: (a) what greet­ings would you send from plant earth, (b) what sounds from earth would you put on the LP, © what pic­tures from earth would you put on the LP, and (d) what music from earth would you put on it? This book is about what Carl Sagan and oth­ers selected, and why.

So, you are shoot­ing a space­craft into the heav­ens, and you have only a sin­gle, gold-plated LP to place the “mes­sage” from planet Earth which you want alien beings to receive. What text, what pic­tures, what sounds, and what music from your planet Earth do you want them to receive as the first mes­sage from Earth? They know noth­ing about you and your planet, so what is the story you want to tell? Breathtaking!!

So there is my pur­port­edly deep thought for the day, in writ­ing about Twit­ter and its 140 char­ac­ters. So pass the Bud Light, and put the TV back on the wrestling match.