Let me go slightly off-topic for just one post here for a public service announcement: You need to go register your law firm or company's Twitter user name. Now.

Exactly one week ago I wrote a column at Securities Docket called, "Please Take 30 Seconds Now, Your Law Firm Will Thank You Later," in which I recounted a discussion I'd recently had with the publisher of a major legal information service (that shall remain nameless). “You don’t realize it yet,” I told him, “but your publication will eventually be on Twitter. You need to take 30 seconds and register your company’s name on Twitter before someone takes it and makes your life complicated down the road” by trying to sell it back to you (or worse). He took my advice and quickly registered his company’s name.

I then turned my attention to the largest law firms in the US, and spent some time checking Twitter for the top 50 law firms on the National Law Journal's top 250 list. To my great surprise, 95% of the names that I am quite confident that these Top 50 law firms will eventually want to use (@dlapiper, @jonesday, @akingump, etc.) were unregistered and available to anyone with an email address for a total cost of $0!

I listed 35 or so of these law firm names in the column and urged readers, even if they didn’t understand what Twitter was, to just take 30 seconds and register their law firm’s name immediately.

And here's the scary part: One week later, every single one of the 35 law firm names I listed has been registered and is now unavailable. I have no way of knowing what percentage of those newly-registered names were actually done by the law firms themselves, but given the 100% registration I fear that "Twitter-squatters" may have hijacked at least some of those names trying to make a buck down the road.

Accordingly, I don't dare list the logical Twitter user names of Compliance Week readers in this post that remain available, but you know what they are: typically it will be the same as your firm's domain name on the Internet or the short-hand name by which people refer to your firm.

So please take just a minute to register your firm's name before someone else does and makes life complicated for you: Click here to register your firm's name on Twitter.