Greetings from the South By Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), a festival focused on cutting edge technologies that attracts the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, programmers and new media entrepreneurs. This five-day festival is held each spring in Austin, Texas, and some call it Spring Break for Geeks. I discussed in my March newsletter why SXSWi is a creative spring break for lawyers and why I planned to attend this year.

Not only does SXSWi offer incredible business development opportunities for lawyers, it also provides creative job search advice for lawyers (and, as you can imagine, many tips involve social networking). I am sharing three tips today and will share more after today’s sessions.

1. Engage on Twitter. I previously wrote about lawyers finding jobs through Twitter and one point I made was that lawyers must socialize and engage with hiring authorities to develop meaningful relationships. The first session I attended at SXSWi was “Using Social Media to Score … A Job (Obviously)” and provided an example of how people obtain jobs by engaging others on Twitter. One attendee was a recruiter from Google and shared that Google recently hired its first employee through Twitter. The person hired caught the recruiter’s attention because he asked questions (directed to the recruiter) on Twitter and engaged the recruiter.

Job-seeking lawyers must also engage hiring authorities on Twitter. Talk to other lawyers, law firm recruiters and third-party recruiters (or legal headhunters). Share information. Ask questions. By the time the firm needs to hire someone, perhaps you will have already developed a relationship with the hiring authorities or at least be on their radar screen.

2. Always Be Looking. One attendee in the session “Funemployed: Success Stories from the Laid Off Community” stressed the need to always be looking for a job, even when you have one, because companies are not loyal. Lawyers should heed this advice as well; if you think all law firms are loyal, think again. Talk to lawyers who were laid off in the recent recession. I know many laid-off lawyers who worked their entire career at one firm but were still laid off; the lawyers’ loyalty to the firm didn’t matter when it came down to law firm economics.

3. Nurture Your Network. One way to “always be looking” is to nurture your network — network not just when you need a job but before you need a job. I recommend that lawyers and law students use, at a minimum, LinkedIn to nurture their networks. Connect with people as you exchange business cards. If you do this consistently, you will have a large network when you need a job. One attendee in the session “Funemployed: Success Stories from the Laid Off Community” shared that although his company filed for bankruptcy last week, he already has 6-7 interviews lined up through various connections in his LinkedIn network.

I plan to tweet from today’s sessions. You can follow my tweets at @aellislegal.