Is LinkedIn Data at Risk?

Reprinted with permission from the Feb. 7, 2014 issue of Law Technology News. ©2014 ALM Media Properties, LLC

What a week—Super Bowl Sunday, followed by LegalTech New York! One thing is certain: You will always find many of the nation’s top players at both.

Last week, I had planned to write an article examining three years of survey data collected from our monthly polls on the Trial Technology LinkedIn group. Questions and responses covered a wide variety of relevant topics, such as favorite trial presentation software, size of firm you work with, type and value of cases you’re involved in, etc.

As I began to prepare, I recalled having some difficulty finding the older poll results. Since this article was going to refer to and analyze that data, it was time to see if I could locate it. It wasn’t included among the more current poll results. There was an option at the bottom of the list to go to the next page. That just brought up the general discussions, not older polls.

Having a bit of experience in running LinkedIn groups, I looked everywhere I could think of, including even backtracking a specific link from an older article of mine,  iPad Apps for Trial Presentation, in which a poll is mentioned: LinkedIn Poll: iPad for Legal Professionals - Tool or Toy? The link goes to a page that simply states, “Poll not found.”

This discovery prompted me to search LinkedIn for possible explanations, and to my dismay, I found a user’s question, with what appears to be an official response from LinkedIn. In summary, the response simply states, “The LinkedIn Polls app was retired on June 30, 2013,” but then continues with “We're continuing to support polls in Groups.” Oh, so in essence, we’ve decided to remove all of the poll data you’ve collected over the past few years, but if you’d like to keep using it, we’ll still support it? I noted in my reply to LinkedIn’s response, “With any user-driven application, it would be safe to assume that some people might actually be using its features, and that they might actually be interested in the results of their work.”

Interestingly, the LegalTech group on LinkedIn has a similar issue, where a user asks, “How do you prefer to get the latest in law news and information?” The response is simply, “Sorry the results for this poll are no longer available.”

There is a new monthly poll on the Trial Technology group in which you are all invited to vote and leave your comments. What do you think about the removal of group data?