The judges have started tweeting. Even though reporters are still waiting for final guidance from the judiciary on the use of ‘live, text-based communication from court’, senior judges have jumped the gun and embraced Twitter with enthusiasm.

Not that you’ll see judges telling us what they had for breakfast or what they think of the barrister who happens to be addressing them. The Judicial Communications Office has its finger firmly on the tweet-button. But this is still a remarkable vote of confidence in a technology that many lawyers still don’t understand.

So let me explain. Twitter enables you to send your subscribers, or ‘followers’, messages of up to 140 letters or spaces, which is the length of this sentence. That limitation, derived from the length of an SMS text message, turned out to be Twitter’s greatest strength. Because each tweet is so short, anyone can follow a number of different tweeters and read through their messages very quickly.

Those messages may be inconsequential chatter. On the other hand, as we saw recently, tweets may include information that is protected by injunctions. Those who tweet such information – or who retweet it – risk being found in contempt of court. That’s because tweets, including those sent in reply to other tweeters, are normally available online to everyone – not just to one’s followers. A pen-name offers little protection.

And now you can find court rulings on Twitter. Of course, no judge is going to compress a judgment into 140 characters – though 140 paragraphs would be a good target for some. The most you can expect is a long headline or short summary. And why would that be of any use?

The answer is that, when composing a tweet, tweeters may paste in a link to the judgment in question. Readers can click straight from the tweet to the source. You don’t even have to worry about a lengthy web address taking up most of your message: these days, Twitter will automatically shorten it to just 19 characters.

But this is where the system breaks down. Since the judges’ tweets are composed by their press office, they are invariably pithy and concise. But the judgments to which these tweets link may be far from accessible to the lay reader. If the judges are going to succeed in their apparent aim of communicating directly with the public, they must summarise their judgments in straightforward language.

And writing those summaries is a job for people who have been trained as journalists. That’s a message that has not been understood by the UK Supreme Court, which publishes summaries that read as if they were meant for foreign judges.

Let me give you an example of a clear judicial tweet at the end of last week that linked to a less than accessible judicial publication. Called The Family Courts: Media Access & Reporting, the paper was published jointly by the president of the High Court family division, the Judicial College (which trains judges) and the Society of Editors, which represents the regional and national press.

The idea was a good one: to explain to ‘journalists, judges and practitioners’ when it would be lawful to report family cases. We are told that the paper was commissioned by a group of lawyers and journalists from both the print and the broadcast media who ‘got together to talk to each other’. There is no further clue as to who they are or why they commissioned a 36-page report with 174 footnotes that will be of rather more use to judges and lawyers than it will be to local newspaper reporters or, still less, litigants who want to know whether to expect reporters in court.

If I say the paper reads like a counsel’s opinion, that is meant as no insult to Adam Wolanski and Kate Wilson, the two counsel who wrote it. Sir Nicholas Wall, president of the family division, rightly describes it as a ‘substantial and very important piece of work’.

But counsel’s client in this case was clearly not the press. Take the basic question of who can attend (though not report) family proceedings held in private in the High Court, the county courts and magistrates’ courts. The paper rightly says that ‘duly accredited members of the media’ are now entitled to attend hearings in these courts. It correctly adds that a person is duly accredited if he or she carries a press card issued by the UK Press Card Authority.

What the paper does not make clear is that a journalist does not have to hold a press card to get into private family proceedings. Rule 27.11(2)(g) of the Family Procedure Rules 2010 says, in effect, that the court may permit a person other than a duly accredited member of the media to be present. If that is the case, it must follow that any person wishing to be present may apply to the judge for permission.

That is as it should be. A freelance writer who is not a member of a trade union and who does not have a contract with a mainstream news organisation will find it difficult to obtain a press card. Reporters who have not been accredited by an industry body should not be excluded from the courts. Whatever Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into phone hacking may recommend, licensing of the press is distasteful.

By the time Leveson reports, of course, there may not be many journalists left. But who needs trained reporters when everyone in court – including the judges – can tweet?