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By KATHERINE MANGAN

A young lawyer named Christy loves Jose Cuervo and hot guys and tends to dump work on her uptight colleague, Dillon, who finds it really annoying when she goes crying to their boss to gain sympathy. He is eager to share details about an impending company buyout that he learned about during lunch with some corporate bigwigs.

They had not imagined that their boss might be reading such juicy tidbits on their Facebook pages, one of which shows Christy posing seductively in a low-slung miniskirt, holding a beer. Dillon's, while less shocking at first glance, reveals confidential client information and broadcasts a pending deal the company would prefer to keep under wraps.

The characters are fictional, but their habit of divulging information - to employers, colleagues, and clients - sounds all too familiar to the two Drake University law professors who created them. Lisa A. Penland, an associate professor of law, and Melissa H. Weresh, a professor of law and assistant director of legal writing, are on a mission to teach law students how to be more professional in an age of bare-all online communication.

"Our students have been raised in a culture in which they communicate very informally and put things out about themselves that we never would have dreamed of sharing with other people," says Ms. Penland.

Besides being overly informal, today's students sometimes show a lack of respect for authority, the professors say.

Both professors have received e-mail messages from students challenging their assignments or explaining why they are too busy to meet in person. (One student said he had an international business to run during his spare time.) Some of the messages are light on capital letters and punctuation marks.

"There's an assumption that you can be informal regardless of who your audience is," says Ms. Penland. Being professional "is not just merely being polite," she adds. "It affects your credibility in the legal and business world."

Last fall the two professors presented a workshop to 160 first-year Drake law students, titled "Professionalism and the Google Generation: What Life on the Internet Left Behind." This month the duo will present their work at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, in Washington, and they hope to take their show on the road to other colleges.

Public vs. Private

One of the pair's goals is to help students realize that many communications they consider private are actually out there for the world to see.

That became painfully clear last year when Celeste F. Bremer, a local federal judge who was cruising the Internet with her daughter, stumbled upon a Facebook page set up by Drake law students.

The rant-filled "I Hate Legal Writing" group page included comments that the two Drake professors, both of whom teach that subject, found threatening. Judge Bremer, of the U.S. District Court in Des Moines, also came across another group that called itself the "Drake Law Drunks." Judge Bremer, who had recently taught a course at Drake and had close ties to the law school, contacted the administration.

"In my e-mail to the deans, I said, 'No one's a bigger supporter of the First Amendment than the court, but students need to act professionally. They're not in high school anymore,'" she said.

University officials began an investigation that included background checks of a few students. "That made some of the students upset because they felt we had been snooping around on their Facebook," Ms. Penland says. "They genuinely didn't understand the public nature of what they were doing. ... Rather than simply saying 'You guys are stupid - I can't believe you put this out there,' we wanted to do something constructive."

She and Ms. Weresh developed a workshop in which students break into small groups to analyze questionable exchanges and comments in blogs, Web pages, and e-mail messages. For entertainment value, the professors created exaggerated examples of boorish behavior, as well as more-subtle examples of disrespectful e-mail message and online chats. The goal is to force students to draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate conversation.

The professors started by looking for Facebook pages whose authors identified themselves as law students. "One student posted pictures of herself in a string bikini, and another picture showed her drinking with a caption like 'Just before I puked at Law Ball,'" Ms. Weresh says.

Working with the university's technology experts, they created Facebook pages for their fictional characters, Lawgirl and Lawboy. On the pages, the two young associates rant about obnoxious partners at their firm piling work on them and brag about how schmoozing and sucking up will one day help them become partners. The professors "howled" as they created the pages, Ms. Weresh says.

Monitoring Tone

The professors say that they are not trying to tell students to avoid MySpace or Facebook, but that students should restrict access to their pages and be careful about what they post.

Students can also hurt their images by sending out e-mail messages that do not show respect for the recipients, Ms. Weresh says. She and Ms. Penland have collected examples of such missives, including some that challenge professors' grading policies or teaching methods.

"This generation is more demanding and tends to feel more entitled to collaboration than we feel is appropriate," says Ms. Weresh, adding that students' messages often reflect this "lack of respect for a hierarchy of authority."

The students could be in for a tough adjustment when they land their first jobs, she says. "Even if you end up with a bunch of laid-back Millennials running a law firm, there's still going to be a hierarchy when you walk into a courtroom."

Trisha A. Fillbach, director of career development at Drake University Law School, says her office also warns students about the Facebook factor. Employers have told her that they regularly Google potential hires and learn more than they need to know about candidates who record their lives on blogs. Some employers go a step further, checking out MySpace and Facebook pages.

"Most of the students I encounter are very mature and understand that perception is everything," Ms. Fillbach says. But her office is telling students that "if anything is out there, it's time to clean it up."

She recently logged on to MySpace and typed "Drake Law School" to see what would pop up. A student who had applied to Drake, among other law schools, shared her impressions in a page "that was full of the F-word," Ms. Fillbach says. "She wasn't saying anything negative about the schools," but her language probably wouldn't help her chances of getting in to any of them.

A quick check on MySpace yielded an eye-popping array of entries from current and recent law students. One recent graduate of an East Coast law school starts his expletive-laden entry with "Sweet! I failed the Texas Bar." He then goes on to detail how miserable law school was, how pointless the bar exam is, and how he will probably fail it again. "Perhaps I should have just sat their [sic] and forced myself to write more regurgitated [expletive] instead of walking out of each of the five sections an hour early," he muses.

Jay Grimes, a 34-year-old first-year law student at Drake, says that he doesn't have a Facebook account, but that the workshop did make him more aware of the dangers of sending out hasty e-mail messages.

"Once you click the send button, whatever you have written goes out and is beyond your control," he says. "If you are not comfortable with shouting your comments from a street corner, you probably shouldn't convey them via electronic print."