Social media marketing will die out. The signs are already there. The companies that succeed on social media are those that use it to listen, to assist, to empower, to inform, to respond and to connect to people as individuals. That just can’t be outsourced, automated or pre-packaged. We urge those lawyers who enjoy social media and who use it in interesting and meaningful ways – to connect with peers, to post interesting insights and to engage in debate – to continue to do so. It isn’t social media that will die; it’s social media marketing.

The ‘brand resonance’ of the terms ‘lawyer’ and ‘solicitor’ is fading. The traditional lifelong solicitor-client relationships of the baby-boomer generation simply don’t exist for generations Y and Z and millennials. Generation Y, those born post-1980, are more sophisticated, discerning, and technology-savvy than previous generations. From a marketing perspective, they have grown up with a constant stream of intrusive marketing and have become inured to it. As such, they are more likely to proactively seek out the services they need online than respond to ads.

The well-publicised Mishcon de Reya £1m fraud case, when its client was duped into buying a London property from a seller dishonestly posing as the owner, has sent ripples of alarm throughout the legal community. Although conveyancers are an obvious target for the increasing threat of rogue house-owner and buyer deposit redirection fraud, it’s not just conveyancing practices that need to be on their guard. As a legal practice, you’re tempting prey for cyber criminals, not only because you hold large sums of money, but also vast volumes of valuable client information. The number, variety and sophistication of cybercrime grows daily, ranging from distributed denial of service attacks and phishing scams to hacking and ransomware.

If the recent furore about McKenzie Friend Marketplace shows anything, it is that the profession remains acutely sensitive to the apparent threat of competition by unregulated entrants into the legal landscape. But for an outside observer, the whole McKenzie Friend debate remains curiously overblown: if not a storm in a teacup, a storm at least in a teapot. For all the characteristic sturm und drang of the Law Society’s response to last year’s senior judiciary consultation, there was pretty widespread agreement among most respondents that McKenzie Friends are here to stay.

I recently sat on a panel debate in Manchester, with the debate entitled – ATE insurers and sub-£250k claims. Whilst the title of the debate was probably written ahead of the government’s consultation paper to introducing fixed recoverable costs in lower-value clinical negligence claims, where £25,000 rather than £250,000 is being recommended, it nevertheless raised an interesting point on how after-the-event insurers can make premiums proportionate to damages, especially for cases worth less than £25,000.