Avvocati e social media: verso nuove comunità professionali?

Abstract

If in the early days the spread of Internet has been often symbolized by the prefix “e” (e-mails, e-commerce, and so on), we can observe that “we” is emerging as a new keyword. This is because communities have been deeply reshaped by the advent of new communication technologies, social media to begin with. Even traditional professional communities, such as lawyers, changed as the dynamics of interaction started to include he “online” dimension. This article maps the features of such interactions focusing on lawyers, first through the analysis of an original research on the Florence community and then through the analysis of Legalit, the largest digital community of lawyers in Italy. The objective is to show to what extent the new communities present traits similar to the traditional ones (for instance in terms of values and behaviors) notwithstanding very different institutional setups, as well as to map the persisting differences (for instance in terms of membership).