I’d call Twitter instant messaging with legs – the legs being the attractively light-touch networking functions provided by Twitter and fleshed out as you please by third party Twitter applications.

As to how lawyers can best take advantage of it, you can do no better than read Steve Matthews’ post on Lawyer Marketing With Twitter (“It’s a big dinner table conversation with peers that you get to choose.”)

Kevin O’Keefe and Connie Crosby also weigh in with useful perspectives.

Tweeting status updates (“What are you doing?”) dominates. If you’re not one for chat, Twitter may not immediately appeal. But there’s no compulsion to chat obsessively; you can gain value by following others, just tweeting sufficiently to keep yourself visible; and/or tweet news, developments, links etc. But immediacy and personality are the key it seems; without that you’re off the radar.

For a flavour of legal tweets, see Steve Matthews’ Legal Voices – an aggregation of tweets from Twitter users in the legal industry.