Corporate counsel may not be the most active social media users, but they are increasingly using it to source legal talent and stay informed.
Ask any in-house counsel whether they use social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone not tapped into a network. If you want solid data to back up what might appear to be anecdotal evidence, statistics from LinkedIn show in-house counsel signing up in droves. Danielle Restivo, LinkedIn's Head of Global Programs, Corporate Communications, says the network has “over 3,000 members with ‘In-House Counsel' in their title, more than 33,000 have ‘General Counsel' in their title.” As an interesting aside, she adds that 470,000 LinkedIn members have the word “lawyer” in their title.
Generally, in-house counsel view social media as a tool for obtaining information, a useful conduit for updating knowledge in their sector and profession. According to the 2013 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey of US in-house counsel conducted by Greentarget, InsideCounsel and Zeughauser Group, “74% of respondents use social media in ‘listen only' mode; they're watching and consuming information, but they may not be actively posting themselves.” Put more succinctly, in-house counsel tend to be “observers.” But even when they are more active, it's with the intent of gathering information. When Fred Headon tweets or goes on LinkedIn, he's “looking to learn about how my internal clients are interacting and with their counterparts elsewhere too, so it's not so much about the ‘what' but about ‘how' they engage with each other.”
How people “conduct themselves at work and at home is changing how they want to work with their lawyers,” says Headon, Assistant General Counsel, Labour and Employment Law at Air Canada in Montreal. “We need to be familiar with social media tools, so that, while I clearly am not providing advice on Twitter, I can engage with my internal clients in short snippets, pointing them to online resources or bringing in other e-tools to help them understand what I am trying to get across.”
For in-house counsel, “swamped with work and running at top speed to keep up, social media represents a helpful shortcut to staying on top of key developments and identifying useful lawyers in certain areas,” says consultant Jordan Furlong. Calling Twitter “an extraordinarily effective mass-communication system,” Furlong, a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises Inc., likens Twitter to “a river of information you step into every so often, to see what's going on in areas that matter to you.”
But LinkedIn, “the world's Rolodex,” is where Ottawa-based Furlong sees in-house counsel as being most comfortable. He says the potential to grow your network through LinkedIn is obvious. But it's the moderated industry and professional groups within LinkedIn, “which can act as a proxy for sitting in on roundtable discussions, that can deliver value to in-house lawyers through convenient access to insights and developments of interest in their chosen fields.”
It's this very ability to get to the heart of a matter, with peers who have trod that road before, that explains why LinkedIn currently has 410 groups dedicated to in-house counsel. “If asked whether they would prefer to have the world's most brilliant 400-page legal analysis of an issue or a conversation with four in-house counsel who've dealt with the same issue in the last year, I don't know a single in-house counsel who wouldn't choose the latter,” says Susan Hackett,CEO, Legal Executive Leadership, LLC, a law practice management consultancy based in the Washington, DC area.
The “beauty of social media,” says Hackett, “is that it enables otherwise unconnected in-house lawyers to find those who have knowledge and experience in solving a problem, rather than just researching the law. They can tap into the wisdom of the in-house crowd by asking: 'Who's done this before? Will you share your experience with me?'”
Frédéric Pérodeau, Senior Director, Inspections and Investigations, l'Autorité des Marchés Financiers in Montreal, uses LinkedIn Groups as a way to keep ahead of the curve in his field. As a provincial regulator, but working in a global environment, he connects with professionals from Canada in similar and related-interest positions, but also from other parts of the world. “What we are trying to do in my job is be proactive,” says Pérodeau, whose organization is mandated by the government of Quebec to regulate the province's financial markets and provide assistance to consumers of financial products. By connecting with other regulators, Montreal-based Pérodeau “has current information on what the upcoming trends are, and therefore, a better understanding of what the upcoming risks may be,” he says.
Like many other in-house counsel interviewed for this article, Pérodeau is discerning about which LinkedIn groups he joins and how much time he spends on social media. In addition to his field of interest in securities, Pérodeau is also a member of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association's (CCCA) National LinkedIn Group. “The CCCA is certainly there to understand the concerns of the in-house counsel community,” says Pérodeau, President of the CCCA Quebec Section and a member of the National Executive Committee, “but also to try to assist them in progressing in career development. The CCCA LinkedIn Group helps me in understanding the concerns and needs of in-house counsel.”
If in-house counsel tend to be “observers,” what's the takeaway for law firms that increasingly devote internal and external resources to produce content? “Just because you don't ‘see' your clients or potential clients actively using social media doesn't mean they aren't there watching what you are doing and saying,” says John Corey, a founding partner of Greentarget, a US professional services communications firm.
“In-house counsel are listening, watching and forming opinions; for that reason, outside counsel shouldn't allow their profiles to just sit there and collect digital dust,” says Amy Knapp of Knapp Marketing, who is a US legal business development strategist and coach. As a result, says Knapp, law firm lawyers need to present themselves in a way that is appropriate to social media. “Don't act like your Summary profile on LinkedIn is a duplication of your website bio, because it is different.”
As for blogs, while in-house counsel do read them, the argument goes back and forth: “Is a blog social media or a printed newsletter gone viral?” Furlong is squarely in the “yes, blogs are social media” camp. “Google loves blogs; they rank high in search-engine rankings, and they can help put a law firm on [in-house counsel's] radar.”
Few in-house counsel blog, adds Furlong. “Many of the traditional drivers of blogging, especially the desire to show off expertise and promote one's practice in a certain area, simply don't apply to in-house lawyers,” he says. As well, many of the issues they would probably want to write about are specific to their company, so there may be confidentiality issues. The key question for any blogging lawyer, says Furlong, is: “Who is your audience? Every publication needs to know its readership. Who's going to read an in-house lawyer's blog, and what benefit will that readership deliver to the in-house counsel?”
Benefit, value and quality do rule the day on social media. Social media excels in helping in-house counsel identify expertise. Through LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs, in-house counsel can “identify a lawyer in a very specific niche area,” says Furlong.
As Knapp writes in her book LinkedIn and Blogs for Lawyers: Building High Value Relationships in a Digital Age, “social media levels the playing field between ‘household name' firms and small and mid-size firms. The smaller firms can compete because size is not an advantage on social media — quality of content is what rules.”
“Everyone is in the social media content business today, but not everyone has something to say,” says Greentarget's Corey. The goal of being on social media, he says, “is to become the subject of other people's conversations.” So if you are contributing content, “it had better be relevant, authentic and have empathy in the sense that you understand the information needs and desires of your audience. What do they want to know, what will add value, more importantly, will they share your content — that's when the value of social media occurs.”
In-house lawyers ”credential their outside law firms through LinkedIn and other social media in ways that many outside lawyers aren't leveraging,” says Hackett. “Twitter becomes a lawyer's best referral network since the whole point of tweeting is to be retweeted. If I tweet something out and you read it and think ‘that's a really interesting article or thought,' and you retweet to your followers with a note that suggests you've just received something interesting from me, you have just introduced me and referred me to your followers as an expert,” she says. ”It's the same with blogs being forwarded or 'liked' by others. What's not to like about smart peers singing your praises to their online colleagues?”
Yet traditional referral methods remain the top choice and are seen as having the most credence. Recommendations from trusted sources still carry the most weight with in-house counsel when making hiring decisions (97 per cent said it was “very” or “somewhat important”), according to the In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey. This was followed closely by biographies on law firm websites (91 per cent). Articles and speeches and blogs published by lawyers on topics relevant to their business were also important, at 79 per cent and 70 per cent, respectively. Forty-nine per cent of respondents said a lawyer's connections or endorsements on LinkedIn were somewhat important, while 63 per cent said a lawyer's LinkedIn profile was somewhat important or very important.
For Sheldon Stener, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Federated Co-operatives Limited in Saskatoon, the allure of Twitter is that “it's fast and up to the second and through it you can monitor the world.” But primarily, he says, “it's not a work tool.” He follows football (he's a big fan of the Saskatchewan Roughriders), tweets about comedians, including such topics as which Will Farrell character is his favourite, and occasionally checks out legal and business-related articles of interest from sector-specific colleagues.
He views social media as informational. “CCCA recently tweeted a link to an article about the new anti-spam legislation, which I sent to my email and later read,” says Stener, a member of the association's executive committee and a participant in its National LinkedIn Group. Still, overall, he doesn't spend a lot of time on social media. “It's more a matter of priorities,” he says, echoing the time constraints often expressed by in-house counsel. “I scan social media, but rely on email. It's hard for me at this point to see social media's value proposition.”
Securities lawyer Caroline Clapham joined Twitter in late 2010. “Over the past three years, it is the social network that has yielded the largest volume of business for me,” says Clapham, an associate at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP in Vancouver. “The joke at the time was that Twitter was a place where people shared what type of sandwich they had for lunch,” recalls Clapham, “But Twitter really started to take off amongst business,” she says. Public companies, particularly in the mining sector, a focus area for her practice, “began launching comprehensive investor relations and public relations strategies that included most of the major social media networks.”
Clapham, who sits on the advisory board for Social Media Week Vancouver, “became fascinated with the disclosure issues that were applicable to public companies using social media,” and started publishing bulletins and giving seminars on the subject. At the time, as a third-year call, “I was not the person who was necessarily going to meet in-house counsel directly, but Twitter was a way to build my reputation quickly.” In effect, she was a forerunner is what is still a fairly nascent but building practice area, with an ever-growing portion of her practice devoted to advising public companies and working with in-house counsel on social media issues.
Julia Gray, Associate General Counsel and Vice-President, Legal Affairs, Canaccord Genuity Corp. in Toronto, has never done a search on LinkedIn to find a lawyer or law firm. Instead, she asks existing contacts for referrals when required. But if someone she doesn't know sends her an email or she wants to know more about a referral, she looks on LinkedIn. At least weekly, she clicks on an article she thinks is relevant.
Gray is hesitant about being on Twitter. “I'm not in a spokesperson role for my job,” she says. Further, “social media tends to be very strong in creating an independent brand, but as in-house counsel your role and your duty is to who you represent, that being your employer.”
Who speaks for the company, when and how, is made more difficult by social media. Employees' enthusiasm for social media can present real challenges for in-house counsel. “There can be the perception that what is said just goes off into the air and will never be picked up,” says Daniel Desjardins, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Bombardier Inc. in Montreal “You don't want every employee on a Facebook or Twitter account to appear to be a spokesperson for the company, which would be chaos from a communications and investor relations point of view.”
As a public company, says Desjardins, “there are rules that apply to our communications. So for us in the law department, it's imperative that we ask and correctly answer questions such as ‘how do we ensure the use of social media is properly governed, that we have the right processes in place – which includes training and monitoring – so employees do understand that because they are on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, it's not a licence to talk about the company.'”
In-house counsel need to be proactive in channelling employees' enthusiasm and defining what is permitted and what is not. “Implement interactive training seminars to help educate employees about the company's social media policy, as well as their inherent duties of loyalty and confidentiality, making it unequivocally clear that those duties apply to them, even while ‘off-duty' and using their own devices,” suggests Ed Majewski, an associate and employment and labour lawyer with Gowlings in Toronto. “Once something has gone viral, those legal duties provide only cold comfort (and likely a hollow remedy from a court and almost certainly a large legal bill) to an employer who hasn't been proactive.”
And put it in writing. “Develop a written policy, avoiding as much legalese as possible, that helps employees make the right choices,” adds Daniel Cole, an associate practising advertising and marketing law in the Toronto office of Gowlings.
Moreover, since employees are embracing social media, find ways to effectively utilize it. Air Canada has introduced Yammer, an “internal social media tool to the workforce,” says Headon, “so employees can now engage with managers and co-workers in this forum to resolve workplace issues, learn more about how things are done at Air Canada and exchange with their coworkers about issues of the day. We're providing employees with a tool that resonates with how they deal with other people in their lives.”
IN HOUSE INSIGHT - GET SOCIAL
“The legal community has some great resources already available through the likes of LinkedIn and Twitter, where some very knowledgeable and forward-thinking people are willing to share a lot of information,” says Fred Headon, President, Canadian Bar Association and the first in-house counsel to serve in that capacity. “So I would recommend for all of us to get more active on social media.” But keep this in mind:
1> Social media is great to a point, says Caroline Clapham, an associate and securities lawyer at Blakes, who uses Twitter as both a listening and a broadcasting method. “But I don't believe it is enough; you have to take some of your online connections offline and meet people to actually solidify a relationship.”
2> Privacy and confidentiality issues haven't been a major minefield for in-house counsel using social media, according to Jordan Furlong, Senior Consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises Inc. “Most lawyers tend to ‘self-police' their conversations. LinkedIn simply moves the forum online,” he says.
3> Advice for internal clients: “What you write on social media is out there forever,” says Daniel Desjardins, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Bombardier Inc. As an analogy, think email. “There's dozens of horror stories in the legal community about damaging emails being picked up in discovery and there goes your case,” he says.
4> Actively listen: “Give employees a safe (i.e., offline) means to vent their real or perceived workplace grievances and a proper channel for raising concerns about the company's business practices,” suggests Ed Majewski of Gowlings.
5> Paper still has a role in building or maintaining connections: Frédéric Pérodeau, Senior Director, Inspections and Investigations, l'Autorité des Marchés Financiers, doesn't think online networking is the preferred solution for every situation. When he sees online, or elsewhere, that a colleague has received a promotion, is nominated for a legal directory or named a Rising Star, he mails a formal letter of congratulations.
6> Your summary section is not the place to sound like a curriculum vitae: This is the place to put your career in context, says Amy Knapp of Knapp Marketing, a US legal business development strategist and coach. “Are you an employment attorney who has a master's degree in psychology? This is the place to talk about it.”
7> In-house counsel are familiar with social media: “Unlike lawyers in law firms, corporate counsel work side by side with successful executives whose job it is to make decisions based on what's trending on Twitter or what big data is suggesting is the movement of the marketplace. Why wouldn't that rub off on the in-house lawyer and her willingness to use this important business tool?” says Susan Hackett, CEO, Legal Executive Leadership.
Ask any in-house counsel whether they use social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn – and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone not tapped into a network. If you want solid data to back up what might appear to be anecdotal evidence, statistics from LinkedIn show in-house counsel signing up in droves. Danielle Restivo, LinkedIn's Head of Global Programs, Corporate Communications, says the network has “over 3,000 members with ‘In-House Counsel' in their title, more than 33,000 have ‘General Counsel' in their title.” As an interesting aside, she adds that 470,000 LinkedIn members have the word “lawyer” in their title.
Generally, in-house counsel view social media as a tool for obtaining information, a useful conduit for updating knowledge in their sector and profession. According to the 2013 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey of US in-house counsel conducted by Greentarget, InsideCounsel and Zeughauser Group, “74% of respondents use social media in ‘listen only' mode; they're watching and consuming information, but they may not be actively posting themselves.” Put more succinctly, in-house counsel tend to be “observers.” But even when they are more active, it's with the intent of gathering information. When Fred Headon tweets or goes on LinkedIn, he's “looking to learn about how my internal clients are interacting and with their counterparts elsewhere too, so it's not so much about the ‘what' but about ‘how' they engage with each other.”
How people “conduct themselves at work and at home is changing how they want to work with their lawyers,” says Headon, Assistant General Counsel, Labour and Employment Law at Air Canada in Montreal. “We need to be familiar with social media tools, so that, while I clearly am not providing advice on Twitter, I can engage with my internal clients in short snippets, pointing them to online resources or bringing in other e-tools to help them understand what I am trying to get across.”
For in-house counsel, “swamped with work and running at top speed to keep up, social media represents a helpful shortcut to staying on top of key developments and identifying useful lawyers in certain areas,” says consultant Jordan Furlong. Calling Twitter “an extraordinarily effective mass-communication system,” Furlong, a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises Inc., likens Twitter to “a river of information you step into every so often, to see what's going on in areas that matter to you.”
But LinkedIn, “the world's Rolodex,” is where Ottawa-based Furlong sees in-house counsel as being most comfortable. He says the potential to grow your network through LinkedIn is obvious. But it's the moderated industry and professional groups within LinkedIn, “which can act as a proxy for sitting in on roundtable discussions, that can deliver value to in-house lawyers through convenient access to insights and developments of interest in their chosen fields.”
It's this very ability to get to the heart of a matter, with peers who have trod that road before, that explains why LinkedIn currently has 410 groups dedicated to in-house counsel. “If asked whether they would prefer to have the world's most brilliant 400-page legal analysis of an issue or a conversation with four in-house counsel who've dealt with the same issue in the last year, I don't know a single in-house counsel who wouldn't choose the latter,” says Susan Hackett,CEO, Legal Executive Leadership, LLC, a law practice management consultancy based in the Washington, DC area.
The “beauty of social media,” says Hackett, “is that it enables otherwise unconnected in-house lawyers to find those who have knowledge and experience in solving a problem, rather than just researching the law. They can tap into the wisdom of the in-house crowd by asking: 'Who's done this before? Will you share your experience with me?'”
Frédéric Pérodeau, Senior Director, Inspections and Investigations, l'Autorité des Marchés Financiers in Montreal, uses LinkedIn Groups as a way to keep ahead of the curve in his field. As a provincial regulator, but working in a global environment, he connects with professionals from Canada in similar and related-interest positions, but also from other parts of the world. “What we are trying to do in my job is be proactive,” says Pérodeau, whose organization is mandated by the government of Quebec to regulate the province's financial markets and provide assistance to consumers of financial products. By connecting with other regulators, Montreal-based Pérodeau “has current information on what the upcoming trends are, and therefore, a better understanding of what the upcoming risks may be,” he says.
Like many other in-house counsel interviewed for this article, Pérodeau is discerning about which LinkedIn groups he joins and how much time he spends on social media. In addition to his field of interest in securities, Pérodeau is also a member of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association's (CCCA) National LinkedIn Group. “The CCCA is certainly there to understand the concerns of the in-house counsel community,” says Pérodeau, President of the CCCA Quebec Section and a member of the National Executive Committee, “but also to try to assist them in progressing in career development. The CCCA LinkedIn Group helps me in understanding the concerns and needs of in-house counsel.”
If in-house counsel tend to be “observers,” what's the takeaway for law firms that increasingly devote internal and external resources to produce content? “Just because you don't ‘see' your clients or potential clients actively using social media doesn't mean they aren't there watching what you are doing and saying,” says John Corey, a founding partner of Greentarget, a US professional services communications firm.
“In-house counsel are listening, watching and forming opinions; for that reason, outside counsel shouldn't allow their profiles to just sit there and collect digital dust,” says Amy Knapp of Knapp Marketing, who is a US legal business development strategist and coach. As a result, says Knapp, law firm lawyers need to present themselves in a way that is appropriate to social media. “Don't act like your Summary profile on LinkedIn is a duplication of your website bio, because it is different.”
As for blogs, while in-house counsel do read them, the argument goes back and forth: “Is a blog social media or a printed newsletter gone viral?” Furlong is squarely in the “yes, blogs are social media” camp. “Google loves blogs; they rank high in search-engine rankings, and they can help put a law firm on [in-house counsel's] radar.”
Few in-house counsel blog, adds Furlong. “Many of the traditional drivers of blogging, especially the desire to show off expertise and promote one's practice in a certain area, simply don't apply to in-house lawyers,” he says. As well, many of the issues they would probably want to write about are specific to their company, so there may be confidentiality issues. The key question for any blogging lawyer, says Furlong, is: “Who is your audience? Every publication needs to know its readership. Who's going to read an in-house lawyer's blog, and what benefit will that readership deliver to the in-house counsel?”
Benefit, value and quality do rule the day on social media. Social media excels in helping in-house counsel identify expertise. Through LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs, in-house counsel can “identify a lawyer in a very specific niche area,” says Furlong.
As Knapp writes in her book LinkedIn and Blogs for Lawyers: Building High Value Relationships in a Digital Age, “social media levels the playing field between ‘household name' firms and small and mid-size firms. The smaller firms can compete because size is not an advantage on social media — quality of content is what rules.”
“Everyone is in the social media content business today, but not everyone has something to say,” says Greentarget's Corey. The goal of being on social media, he says, “is to become the subject of other people's conversations.” So if you are contributing content, “it had better be relevant, authentic and have empathy in the sense that you understand the information needs and desires of your audience. What do they want to know, what will add value, more importantly, will they share your content — that's when the value of social media occurs.”
In-house lawyers ”credential their outside law firms through LinkedIn and other social media in ways that many outside lawyers aren't leveraging,” says Hackett. “Twitter becomes a lawyer's best referral network since the whole point of tweeting is to be retweeted. If I tweet something out and you read it and think ‘that's a really interesting article or thought,' and you retweet to your followers with a note that suggests you've just received something interesting from me, you have just introduced me and referred me to your followers as an expert,” she says. ”It's the same with blogs being forwarded or 'liked' by others. What's not to like about smart peers singing your praises to their online colleagues?”
Yet traditional referral methods remain the top choice and are seen as having the most credence. Recommendations from trusted sources still carry the most weight with in-house counsel when making hiring decisions (97 per cent said it was “very” or “somewhat important”), according to the In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey. This was followed closely by biographies on law firm websites (91 per cent). Articles and speeches and blogs published by lawyers on topics relevant to their business were also important, at 79 per cent and 70 per cent, respectively. Forty-nine per cent of respondents said a lawyer's connections or endorsements on LinkedIn were somewhat important, while 63 per cent said a lawyer's LinkedIn profile was somewhat important or very important.
For Sheldon Stener, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Federated Co-operatives Limited in Saskatoon, the allure of Twitter is that “it's fast and up to the second and through it you can monitor the world.” But primarily, he says, “it's not a work tool.” He follows football (he's a big fan of the Saskatchewan Roughriders), tweets about comedians, including such topics as which Will Farrell character is his favourite, and occasionally checks out legal and business-related articles of interest from sector-specific colleagues.
He views social media as informational. “CCCA recently tweeted a link to an article about the new anti-spam legislation, which I sent to my email and later read,” says Stener, a member of the association's executive committee and a participant in its National LinkedIn Group. Still, overall, he doesn't spend a lot of time on social media. “It's more a matter of priorities,” he says, echoing the time constraints often expressed by in-house counsel. “I scan social media, but rely on email. It's hard for me at this point to see social media's value proposition.”
Securities lawyer Caroline Clapham joined Twitter in late 2010. “Over the past three years, it is the social network that has yielded the largest volume of business for me,” says Clapham, an associate at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP in Vancouver. “The joke at the time was that Twitter was a place where people shared what type of sandwich they had for lunch,” recalls Clapham, “But Twitter really started to take off amongst business,” she says. Public companies, particularly in the mining sector, a focus area for her practice, “began launching comprehensive investor relations and public relations strategies that included most of the major social media networks.”
Clapham, who sits on the advisory board for Social Media Week Vancouver, “became fascinated with the disclosure issues that were applicable to public companies using social media,” and started publishing bulletins and giving seminars on the subject. At the time, as a third-year call, “I was not the person who was necessarily going to meet in-house counsel directly, but Twitter was a way to build my reputation quickly.” In effect, she was a forerunner is what is still a fairly nascent but building practice area, with an ever-growing portion of her practice devoted to advising public companies and working with in-house counsel on social media issues.
Julia Gray, Associate General Counsel and Vice-President, Legal Affairs, Canaccord Genuity Corp. in Toronto, has never done a search on LinkedIn to find a lawyer or law firm. Instead, she asks existing contacts for referrals when required. But if someone she doesn't know sends her an email or she wants to know more about a referral, she looks on LinkedIn. At least weekly, she clicks on an article she thinks is relevant.
Gray is hesitant about being on Twitter. “I'm not in a spokesperson role for my job,” she says. Further, “social media tends to be very strong in creating an independent brand, but as in-house counsel your role and your duty is to who you represent, that being your employer.”
Who speaks for the company, when and how, is made more difficult by social media. Employees' enthusiasm for social media can present real challenges for in-house counsel. “There can be the perception that what is said just goes off into the air and will never be picked up,” says Daniel Desjardins, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Bombardier Inc. in Montreal “You don't want every employee on a Facebook or Twitter account to appear to be a spokesperson for the company, which would be chaos from a communications and investor relations point of view.”
As a public company, says Desjardins, “there are rules that apply to our communications. So for us in the law department, it's imperative that we ask and correctly answer questions such as ‘how do we ensure the use of social media is properly governed, that we have the right processes in place – which includes training and monitoring – so employees do understand that because they are on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, it's not a licence to talk about the company.'”
In-house counsel need to be proactive in channelling employees' enthusiasm and defining what is permitted and what is not. “Implement interactive training seminars to help educate employees about the company's social media policy, as well as their inherent duties of loyalty and confidentiality, making it unequivocally clear that those duties apply to them, even while ‘off-duty' and using their own devices,” suggests Ed Majewski, an associate and employment and labour lawyer with Gowlings in Toronto. “Once something has gone viral, those legal duties provide only cold comfort (and likely a hollow remedy from a court and almost certainly a large legal bill) to an employer who hasn't been proactive.”
And put it in writing. “Develop a written policy, avoiding as much legalese as possible, that helps employees make the right choices,” adds Daniel Cole, an associate practising advertising and marketing law in the Toronto office of Gowlings.
Moreover, since employees are embracing social media, find ways to effectively utilize it. Air Canada has introduced Yammer, an “internal social media tool to the workforce,” says Headon, “so employees can now engage with managers and co-workers in this forum to resolve workplace issues, learn more about how things are done at Air Canada and exchange with their coworkers about issues of the day. We're providing employees with a tool that resonates with how they deal with other people in their lives.”
IN HOUSE INSIGHT - GET SOCIAL
“The legal community has some great resources already available through the likes of LinkedIn and Twitter, where some very knowledgeable and forward-thinking people are willing to share a lot of information,” says Fred Headon, President, Canadian Bar Association and the first in-house counsel to serve in that capacity. “So I would recommend for all of us to get more active on social media.” But keep this in mind:
1> Social media is great to a point, says Caroline Clapham, an associate and securities lawyer at Blakes, who uses Twitter as both a listening and a broadcasting method. “But I don't believe it is enough; you have to take some of your online connections offline and meet people to actually solidify a relationship.”
2> Privacy and confidentiality issues haven't been a major minefield for in-house counsel using social media, according to Jordan Furlong, Senior Consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises Inc. “Most lawyers tend to ‘self-police' their conversations. LinkedIn simply moves the forum online,” he says.
3> Advice for internal clients: “What you write on social media is out there forever,” says Daniel Desjardins, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Bombardier Inc. As an analogy, think email. “There's dozens of horror stories in the legal community about damaging emails being picked up in discovery and there goes your case,” he says.
4> Actively listen: “Give employees a safe (i.e., offline) means to vent their real or perceived workplace grievances and a proper channel for raising concerns about the company's business practices,” suggests Ed Majewski of Gowlings.
5> Paper still has a role in building or maintaining connections: Frédéric Pérodeau, Senior Director, Inspections and Investigations, l'Autorité des Marchés Financiers, doesn't think online networking is the preferred solution for every situation. When he sees online, or elsewhere, that a colleague has received a promotion, is nominated for a legal directory or named a Rising Star, he mails a formal letter of congratulations.
6> Your summary section is not the place to sound like a curriculum vitae: This is the place to put your career in context, says Amy Knapp of Knapp Marketing, a US legal business development strategist and coach. “Are you an employment attorney who has a master's degree in psychology? This is the place to talk about it.”
7> In-house counsel are familiar with social media: “Unlike lawyers in law firms, corporate counsel work side by side with successful executives whose job it is to make decisions based on what's trending on Twitter or what big data is suggesting is the movement of the marketplace. Why wouldn't that rub off on the in-house lawyer and her willingness to use this important business tool?” says Susan Hackett, CEO, Legal Executive Leadership.
