You are on the phone with a colleague and suddenly you feel as though you are speaking to yourself. You hear in the background the clicking of a computer keyboard, and you realize that you’ve lost the other person’s attention. They are surfing the Internet or, more likely, checking their Facebook or Twitter account.

Your associate brings to your attention the Facebook page of a plaintiff or a claimant in a sexual harassment claim which includes revealing pictures of the claimant.

Your own Facebook page identifies people you may know whom you may wish to “friend” — and some of them are colleagues or associates in your law firm.

You are “friended” by an associate in your law firm, or an adversary, or another person with whom you have a professional relationship.

Your client informs you of a Twitter post in which an employee has made comments criticizing the company’s promotion and pay practices, suggesting they may be discriminatory.

Your client’s director of human resources has posted anti-gay comments on his MySpace page.

The above list of events is but a small sampling of the kinds of day-to-day issues that face employment lawyers — and all of us. Dalton Conley, a sociologist and acting dean for social sciences at New York University, says that the BlackBerry is a symbol of always being beckoned somewhere else. In comes an e-mail from a colleague, a client, each asking for a little piece of our attention, which, if granted, only begets more demands on our time. We’re pulled by work when we’re at home and by home when we’re at work, torn by the multiple things we could be getting done.

via Legal Technology – Social Networking and the New Workplace .