To Facebook or not to Facebook? This is a question that is increasingly being asked in legal circles.

I’ve long been a Facebook scoffer - and thought it was an ego-centric timewaster (of course everyone in the world wants to know what I had for dinner last night (pumpkin soup) and my favourite color (red)).

However, Facebook is undeniably a massive global phenomenon, despite the recent backlash due to privacy concerns, and is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

With over 400 million users online you’ve got to think that to ignore its potential for business is a mistake.

A new survey of corporate counsel in the US documents the increasing reliance on social media sites like blogs, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Facebook for professional news and information (and of course for personal use).

The survey run by US firm Green Target  measures how inhouse counsel (the primary purchasers of outside legal services) are listening to the social media messages sent by the big law firms.

Do you use Facebook for business reasons? If so why and how?

In September last year (2008) CCH asked professionals across the Asia Pacific what they thought of Web 2.0 – you can read the full report here.  One of the questions we asked was what professionals thought about the value of particular social networks. 

Here are the results for legal professionals who use social networks for work purposes at least once a week.

Source: CCH 2008

Last year, Facebook was seen to be more useful to social network-savvy lawyers than LinkedIn, although 50% did believe it was useful. How about legal professionals in general, not just those who are already using social networks?

Source: CCH 2008

Unsurprisingly the numbers are much lower, and there is a clear perception that a network specifically for lawyers would be more useful than LinkedIn or Facebook.  Of course, some of our respondents may not have been familiar with LinkedIn and therefore underestimated its potential relevance.

Now what is particularly interesting is that we conducted this survey in September, and since then the number of people from the legal industry registered on LinkedIn has doubled from 406,000 to 840,000 (numbers from Stem Legal’s Law Firm Web Strategy Blog).  It would be interesting to see if many of our respondents who originally expressed little interest in LinkedIn have changed their minds.