In an ongoing effort here at Stem, we’ve been tracking the growth of the “Law Practice Industry” category on LinkedIn. For a bit more than a year now, we’ve run periodic searches on Google to see how many profile pages are indexed which include the industry class ‘law practice industry’.

Predictably, but still impressively, that number continues to grow. June’s number now shows 840,000 people within the law practice industry. In reviewing these profiles, we see a very high percentage of those people are lawyers; although it is an industry class and not professional.

With all factors consistent on each dated sample, here’s how things have stacked up:

• April 2008: 118,000
• June 2008: 216,000
• December 2008: 406,000
• March 2009: 563,000
• June 2009: 840,000

So what’s new in the world of lawyers on LinkedIn? A couple of observations:

• Groups: From legal marketing and technology to practice-specific groups for almost any area of law you can think of, lawyers on LinkedIn are getting more value out of their network by engaging in discussion. Groups are being used for Job postings, vendor recommendations, general questions, and sharing articles and links.
• Applications: Applications are basically widgets; tools that allow you to add external data into your LinkedIn profile. Two popular amongst lawyers are the Slideshare Presentations app, which lets you share presentations; and the RSS feed display, where you can post the feed from your blog, JD Supra documents, or any other content you like.
• Company pages: Just as important as individual profiles are company pages within LinkedIn. For instance, Clark Wilson’s profile includes a description of the firm’s services, a snapshot of current and former employees, location and contact details, and interesting auto-generated statistics such as median age, gender split, and top schools. Savvy law firms and other companies in the industry recognize this as a valuable opportunity to sculpt their online image.

Want a quasi brave prediction? That 840K number is going to be well over a million profiles by September 1st.

And thank-you to Larry Bodine for his email request to update the numbers!