Kill All The Lawyers
I just grabbed breakfast with a friend, who also works in the Social Media trenches, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves nodding vigorously in agreement that “the lawyers are getting worse.”
In my humble opinion, the bigger a brand is, the more it can and should invest in lawyers who MAXIMIZE their ability to be adaptable to market conditions.
Instead we find that bigger brands’ legal eagles are doing their best to muzzle the company’s own evangelists.
It shouldn’t take 3–5 days to approve a tweet.
It shouldn’t take a week to approve a comment on an external blog.
It should be allowable to post a perfectly appropriate twitpic.
It should be allowable to re-share content that outside consumers have themselves proactively shared across their social graphs: If a consumer tweets a photo of themselves holding the brand’s top product (“Here I am with my SuperWidget! I love this thing!”), it should not require special dispensation to RT that photo with a simple, “Thanks for your support! We love it too!”
If the brand has hired outside consultants or has paid relationships with bloggers or other Word-of-Mouth evangelists, it should be perfectly OK for those folks to re-share public announcements by that brand. My friend told me that despite his publicly-disclosed relationship with a large tech brand, they disallowed him from re-tweeting one of their own (positive, public) posts. The phrase, “WTF?” comes to mind.
Bizarrely, in my experience this is getting worse, not better. In the early days of Social Media, more often than not we ran across some perfectly reasonable lawyers. I am not sure whether that was because they didn’t quite grok it in the first place, or because early social evangelists were perhaps more dogged in their demands, or because those earlier-days legalistas were so comfortable with brand standards that they saw no harm in sharing content developed by trusted brand insiders. In any case, as Social Media has professionalized, so, it seems, have the watchdogs.
It’s kinda making things difficult. And boring.
And that’s my Monday morning vent.
Posted on: March 19, 2012 at 12:51 pm By Todd Defren
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The problem with the legal profession as it currently stands is that the only difference between the lawyer who is trying to bankrupt me and the one who is defending me from the first one is…who spoke to which lawyer first.
There is such a thing as justice and the rule of law, but there are always lawyers standing on either side of the issue no matter how little sense it makes to the rest of us, and no matter who wins the only ones guaranteed to come out richer when all is said and done are the lawyers. That they willingly represent what is foolishness to the rest of us and typically come out richer regardless of which side of the foolishness they stand on is the reason so many of the rest of us have problems with the profession in general.
“Let’s kill all the UNREASONABLE lawyers” – wouldn’t have been such a catchy phrase for Shakespeare…
Being an inhouse-counsel-turned-lawyer myself (in Germany), I can fully understand the frustration normal human beings often suffer from when they have to deal with the legal department. Having said that, I think one of the greatest possible qualifications of a legal professional is being able to avoid unnecessary frustration of that kind (alas, one will not always be able to avoid it).
As regards the relationship between social media and the law: I have written about it and consulted with regard to it quite a bit over the course of the last five years, besides of course using the tools myself. It’s always interesting to see what approach is taken – most established brand owners here in Germany who use social media first “make a thorough plan”. But, once that is done ideally with involvement of the legal department, ongoing involvement of the legal department in the way you describe seems to be absolutely an exception over here. Necessity of receiving approval for a tweet? This procedure is always a running joke in discussions with colleagues and and managers over here, but I have so far not come across that many companies which would go down that road when it comes to their approach to social media.
Would be quite impressive if the general approach in Germany should be more relaxed in this context than in the US.
I just saw a very interesting South by Southwest panel on this very topic. Here’s a report, with some (hopefully) helpful suggestions for how social media managers and lawyers can work together more easily:
http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/03/lawyers-social-media-managers/.
I got here in a roundabout way so I’m not sure who to thank. As a lawyer I find your rant both sad and funny. Sad because you’re right. Funny because I’m often the only lawyer among my peers willing to say Yes to social media.
I’ve been online since the beginning. When I went to law school (for fear of dating myself), dialup was all the rage and the only IM possibility was Prodigy. There were no classes on social anything, my copyright class had nothing to do with ‘the interwebz’, software or instant communication. When I got my first job out of law school few lawyers were online beyond using Lexis/Nexus in the law library. Me? I’d go home an crank up the AT&T Worldnet and see how law, branding and intellectual property were blending.
Brand people hate lawyers. I know that. And it’s because lawyers say “NO!” a great deal. I refused to be one of those. Early on I decided that my job as a lawyer was to tell brand marketers and entrepreneurs, Yes. Of course it’s not an unqualified YES. However, it’s not my job as a lawyer to limit creativity and passion. I feel it’s my job to explain the risks and let you decide.
The legal arena is not much different than the stock market – some times you win, some times you lose. There are down days and up days, and sometimes the stock just tanks. But you can’t be afraid, and I think that’s where many lawyers are today. Decisions made from fear are never good decisions.
Thanks, again, for ranting. If only it didn’t fall on deaf ears in the legal profession.
And, for fear of being ‘turned in’ you get this:
Disclosure: I am a lawyer. Nothing in this comment is to be considered legal advice nor does it create an attorney/client relationship.
Great rant.
I don’t get why legal teams treat social media as different from any other form of PR. Companies routinely entrust spokespeople to talk to the media, government representatives, customers, etc. without having to ok every sentence of every interaction through legal. Of course, this usually requires pre-approved talking points, Q&As, messages, etc. that are vetted by legal, but those can also apply to social media interactions.
PR practioners are hired because they are professionals. They actually do their jobs with more than common sense. If they don’t, get rid of them just like you would anyone else.
As much as I want to hate on lawyers right now, I have to disagree and say that they are a necessary evil. Having worked with startups that work with large/massive corporate brands and waiting days and sometimes weeks for a press release, tweet or facebook comment to be approved is painful but generally for the best. There are so many things that they are doing beyond our PR strategic consulting that they need to make sure it doesn’t disrupt anything else or rub their customers the wrong way. Anyone can sue you for any reason.
With regard to Chris Norton’s comment, common sense isn’t that common. Sorry to be cliche but I don’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt anymore until I really get to know them.
Now when I work with startups on social media and they have to personally approve every tweet, that’s another story…
My own blog response: Before You Think About Killing Lawyers, How About Educating Yourself and Them? http://somelaw.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/before-you-think-about-killing-lawyers-how-about-educating-yourself-and-them/
Ryan, the speed and depth of your reply left me a little breathless. Great stuff, thank you.
As I noted on Twitter: my sincerest gripes are “speed” + “genuinely clueless and deeply uncurious obstructionism” … FWIW the PR/Social team, in some cases, has zero facetime to make its case. The lawyers at some big brands are faceless, nameless corporate folks who make pronouncements vs. engage/discuss/debate with their marketing teams (and partners).
x-surrepply from my blog as well
There’s no doubt that a gap exists between good lawyers and bad lawyers in any subject, including social media. The trick is finding out if these lawyers are being bad because they don’t know any better (or can be taught) or they’re just lawyers who don’t care.
But you’re better armed knowing as much as you can about the attorney’s concerns–then if it turns out they’re just non-responsive or unwilling to learn you can present that information to your client and they can act (or sigh deeply) accordingly.
Todd, I don’t disagree but would argue they are doing their job. We all play the gatekeeper role from time to time and an attorney’s role is rather unique. While we try to keep clients and their messaging ethical or make sure they don’t destroy relations we’ve built (have you ever told your client you wouldn’t do a press conference for a rather benign announcement?) the attorney’s role is to keep us out of court or worse jail. I’ve worked in two industries and have seen penalties and jail time for rouge updates – of course back then it was via email.
There are steps to grease the wheels of progress, getting an attorney to better understand why we want our posts to have a particular theme or follow a particular strategy but at the end of they day we invited them into the room for a particular need and if I don’t follow their advice I’ve only got myself to blame for the consequences which might follow.
The voice of reason, Bill. Remember, I am venting, here – not necessarily being reasonable. And the reason I am peevish is because SOME of those legal barriers are, quite honestly, stupid/nonsensical/arbitrary/really stupid. (And yes, I meant to use stupid 2x. That is how stupid some of this stuff is!)
Todd – I do love it when you have a good old rant.
The lawyers are a pain in the arse (I might get sued now). I am completely with you. There should be a common sense approach to this. In social media someone should be able to say if they like something and also say something if they don’t.
For instance, I have advised clients before that their products aren’t good enough for outreach before. I have morals and stick to a certain code of ethics that good PR people should. I find it daft that we have lawyers and box tickers in (mainly the public sector) stopping the rest of us sharing useful content at the right time.
Getting every single message approved is counter-productive and that’s why it’s the edgier companies that have better social media presences.
Chin up – after all it is Monday.
“there should be a common sense approach to this” – AMEN, that’s what I am trying to say through the mists of frustrated rage.