A year ago, when The Times’ legal editor Frances Gibb joined Twitter, uploaded a profile photo and wrote herself a bio, legal market watchers rushed to follow her. Almost overnight, she attracted 200 of us.
What exciting law-related titbits was this well-connected hack going to reveal, we wondered? And kept wondering, as Gibb stubbornly refused to send a single tweet. Seasons passed. Revolution swept North Africa. The Euro teetered on the verge of collapse. And still Gibb remained silent. Who knows, perhaps she logged onto Twitter and belted out a few words on the legal aspects of those events before thinking better of sharing them.
“Not yet, Frances,” she may have whispered under her breath, as she noted that failure to tweet hadn’t prevented her follower count from rising to in excess of 800.
Then last Thursday the new CPS list of approved advocates was released, and Gibb noted that it didn’t tally with the official letters sent out. It was time.
And then nothing again…
Gibb’s fellow legal journalist David Allen Green suffers no such reluctance to share his feelings with his Twitter followers. Sometimes, though, he’s not very nice to them – a tendency that may partly explain his habit of deleting his tweets at the end of each week.
His followers don’t always delete them, of course. Here’s Green’s December exchange with trainee lawyer Mark Pentecost, who he calls “a twat”.
Pentecost: Seriously considering unfollowing everyone who is tweeting about x-factor. Even @DavidAllenGreen is at it. Good grief.
Green to Pentecost: Then just bloody un-follow and don’t whinge about it. Please
Pentecost to Green: Consider it done. Thanks. *sheesh*
Green quotes Pentecost’s bio back at him, “executive committee member of the Junior Lawyers Division of the Law Society”, before adding: and clearly a twat