In-house ACCess : In-house ACCess: Association of Corporate Counsel : ACC : The In-house Counsel Bar Association

By June Casalmir 

June Casalmir is Counsel for Consumer & Marketing Practices at Sprint Nextel, where she advises on a wide variety of marketing, advertising, and consumer-related issues. In her role, June supports the company’s social media, business marketing, and sports marketing efforts.   

I am a curious person by nature, and notwithstanding my liberal arts background, I confess to having a secret desire to be an applications coder. When I’m working with my client social media teams, this has the unfortunate result of me probably spending a little too much time reading applications protocol interface (API) requirements. Yet is there actually a job-related reason to cram my brain full of technology tidbits? 

My curiosity got the best of me, and so I turned to some other in-house attorneys who also work with their companies’ social media teams for their assistance. Could they help me justify my curiosity? And what other odd predilections have they developed while supporting their companies’ social media teams?

I had a great time speaking with attorneys from large companies, sports teams and digital agencies, and learned quite a bit about their experiences. I didn’t get any closer to realizing my secret dream of coding the next Facebook, but I learned that we share the following views on how to best support our social media clients:

• We want to understand the unique business needs associated with social media;
• We hope to educate our clients on legal issues
• We are social media participants ourselves.
  

Be on the business side

The phrase “support the business” is one that constantly guides the work of in-house attorneys. We need to insure that the clients do the right thing, but we also need to work with internal clients to find practical, palatable business solutions. When it comes to working with social media teams, the needs can be unique and may differ from even those that apply to traditional communications, marketing or sales efforts. 

Social media teams — and particularly PR social media teams — often need to respond quickly, because bad press spreads rapidly and easily on Twitter, Facebook and online forums. If you access the same technologies as the clients, you get an immediate, front-seat view of what is being said about your company on social media sites. If your company policies allow it, take advantage of this opportunity by downloading an application like TweetDeck, which pushes tweets to your desktop in real time.  

In her role as associate general counsel at Rockfish, Ryane Ward handles many legal facets of the digital agency’s work, but makes sure her social media teams know that she is available to advise when they need to quickly launch services or make program changes. “Being flexible and understanding the tight timelines faced by my internal teams and our clients is just part of my job as a legal advisor,” says Ward.

Integrating the legal function into social media strategy discussions is another way to help support business needs. However, in speaking with my in-house peers, it dawned on me that strategy integration can take different forms. While I am lucky that my Sprint clients invite me to attend their weekly social media leadership team meetings, that isn’t the only way to foster close client alignment. “The technologies and the legal issues are constantly evolving,” says Cameron Westcott, legal counsel at Kia Motors of America. “As a result, I find myself learning about the different social media platforms and legal developments along with my clients.” Scaling the learning curve together with his clients gives Westcott the ability to understand their business challenges first-hand and simultaneously discuss potential legal issues.  

Educate your clients 

I have an arguably selfish motive for training my social media clients in legal issues: Arming them with knowledge of the relevant legal concepts simply makes my job easier. 

For example, if my marketing clients are aware that a method requiring purchase or considerable effort can’t be the only way for a consumer to enter a sweepstakes, they’ll structure their tweet-to-win giveaway appropriately. Who doesn’t need their already-busy worklife to be a little easier? I certainly do, and educating my social media clients has paid huge dividends in that regard.

My clients seemed to enjoy our past training sessions, asking perceptive legal questions about IP, employment and privacy. At this especially busy time of year though, formalized training sessions have fallen to the wayside. As a result, I try to spend a few more minutes   explaining my analysis so that my clients have a practical understanding of the legal parameters for other projects.    

My company’s suburban campus is fairly large, and most of my social clients are a cold, December walk away in different buildings, so I don’t get to visit them as much this time of year. Nevertheless, I should consider visiting my clients more often — not only to foster better relationships with them, but for client education purposes, too.  David Cohen, director of legal affairs for the L.A. Angels of Anaheim, calls this “internal rainmaking.” He says, “It really helps to stop by and see internal clients' offices and take advantage of the casual, spontaneous discussions to provide a more detailed explanation or provide a point-of-view.”    

Walk the walk 

 Every in-house attorney interviewed stressed the need to be a social media user in order to be a good social media lawyer. Using Twitter and Facebook and learning how to “check-in” on Foursquare gives us a realistic picture of the user interfaces and platform norms that consumers encounter. This, in turn, gives us the ability to provide business-centric advice. “Subtle differences matter,” says Michael McSunas, senior counsel – Advertising, Marketing & Promotions at Chrysler. “Linking to a video stream of a concert versus streaming the concert yourself has different legal implications, and the clients like to understand those differences.” In addition to standard marketing and promotional matters, McSunas also counts music licensing and international matters as areas where social media know-how makes a critical difference.

If the thought of signing up for a Twitter account and having nothing to tweet but pictures of your breakfast is a major hurdle to your social media participation, you may want to reconsider. Twitter is characterized on its site as a place where you can “follow your interests,” and its own web copy doesn’t exhort you to tweet anything. For that reason, attorneys are turning to Twitter as a primary way to receive legal updates or network with other legal professionals. If you find the right people or accounts to follow, you can get relevant news quickly. In fact, agencies like the FCC and the FTC use social media to both send out updates from their agencies and receive input from consumers. For example, the FTC will regularly sponsor privacy-related Twitter chats using the #FTCpriv hashtag. Notably, the ACC team is particularly adept at using social media. Along with the @ACCinhouse account, ACC Docket Editor in Chief Kim Howard (@KimHowardDC) tops my “must follow” Twitter list.  

After speaking with some of my colleagues in other companies, I felt better about my secret desire to be an app developer. They may not harbor the same coder envy as me, but we all acknowledge the need to educate ourselves on what our social media clients experience daily. Moreover, we recognize the need to be “in it” ourselves — both as integrated team members and as participants.   

Hey, do you know of any app-development courses I can take? Maybe if I tweet that question, I’ll get some good recommendations …

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 Follow along as our new ACC President and CEO, Veta T. Richardson, chronicles her first year at ACC, with this monthly blog series. The voice, views and stories expressed in this series are of the author and are not ACC's. To read the first installment of this series, click here.

On the Importance of Mentoring

Short of educational preparedness, having a mentor is probably the single most important factor separating those who succeed versus those who stumble or fail. That, or a rich parent! 

While so many successful people like to tell stories of how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, going from rags to riches, the truth is that everyone has help along the way. There are no truly “self made” successful people. And at various junctures in our professional lives, we will be in the position of seeking a mentor or serving as a mentor to others.

So, where does one find a mentor to help guide and develop her career path? Potential mentors are all around you –– they are members of professional associations or alumni networks to which you belong, they are in your workplace, they are family members, friends or friends of friends. The possibilities are as endless as the many avenues you have to meet and connect with others. However, finding the right mentor first requires a little self-analysis: What are you looking for in the relationship? What types of advice are you seeking?

Once you have clear objectives, it will become easier to identify people who have the knowledge and perspectives that you are seeking. Your next step is putting yourself in the right place to initiate an opening conversation with your potential mentor. Once you have that opportunity, be honest and genuine about your desire for their help, which should not include asking them to help you find a job. That’s not the best way to start a relationship with a mentor. A better approach would be to ask for advice about how to best present yourself, learn more about a topic of interest, or identify the knowledge and skills gaps between where you are and where you want to go.

On the flip side, being a good mentor to others will teach you a lot about how to best utilize and develop your relationship with your own mentor. You will grow by seeing the world through another’s experience, and hone your problem solving skills as you listen to their challenges and offer advice.

In this first year as ACC president, I am experiencing mentorship first hand through my relationship with Fred Krebs, ACC's former president. Even when I was executive director of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA), Fred was an experienced bar association leader to whom I turned for advice as I navigated unfamiliar situations. These days, I feel especially lucky to have him as a resource. He understands the nuances of ACC’s governance framework, and shares the history that underlies how things are now done and the lessons he learned over 20 successful years in this role. We get together pretty regularly, and Fred remains a trusted advisor. 

In this role, I am also sought out by others who are mid-career or just getting started. Last month, I met a wonderful group of law students at the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) Annual Meeting, which took place in Atlanta. Law students from all over the country, the vast majority of whom were of Asian heritage, were invited to participate in a program called “8 Minute Mentoring,” hosted by my former colleagues at MCCA. Although I am not Asian American, the group made me feel fully included and welcomed. If you aren't involved with NAPABA, you should really check them out. The students asked some tough questions about how to navigate their way through a very difficult time when job opportunities are scarce. I did my very best to offer them good advice. But imagine how gratifying it was to return to my office and receive a number of handwritten notes and emails to let me know that my time with them was valuable and appreciated.  

So, I am a big believer in the power of mentoring and invite you to experience it first-hand with the support of ACC, whether you are seeking a mentor or wish to offer to be a mentor to someone else. 

Fortunately, ACC is able to help with both needs –– the opportunity to be a mentor as well as to connect with a mentor.  ACC’s new mentoring program –– a peer-to-peer initiative designed to help you grow your career, while helping others advance theirs –– is has no formal requirements for participation. We only ask that mentors and mentees who are located in the same city meet for lunch three times a year, and that mentors be available to provide advice via phone when needed. Beyond this, mentors and mentees are free to contact each other as often as they like.

It’s easy to get started: Just login to the community platform and select the “Enroll as a Mentee” or “Enroll as a Mentor” tab to the left. Once you enroll, you can find mentors or mentees based on geographic location, industry or discipline!

To learn more about this program, visit http://community.acc.com/mentoring. Still have questions? Email membership@acc.com.

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Howie Wong is general counsel and corporate secretary at Toronto Community Housing, which is the largest landlord in Canada. Prior to joining Toronto Community Housing in 2005, Howie was an M&A lawyer for 19 years with Gowlings, a national Canadian law firm.

David Allgood’s office is surprisingly spartan. Search as you will, but do not expect to find fancy glass and marble, as would befit the Executive Vice President & general counsel of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the largest bank in Canada. Rather, David oversees 160 lawyers in 11 countries from a non-descript back office, where I sat in the hallway, waiting my turn to see him. But, don’t be fooled; he is definitely a power to be reckoned with in the banking world.

David’s approach to diversity is no different — no flash, just pure substance.

Diversity is a core value at RBC that emanates from the CEO down. Their website is impressive — chock-full of information, initiatives, progress reports and metrics. RBC has enough diversity awards on its mantel to make any mother proud.

RBC Law has a significant number of female leaders as well. Sixty percent of its executives and 40 percent of the senior managers are women. The number of diverse leaders is somewhat less, but laudable all the same. 

David focuses on filling the pipeline at the entry-mid levels with the next generation of diverse leaders. When hiring, RBC mandates that the candidate pool for every vacancy include at least one female and one diverse candidate. A big challenge is the retention of female lawyers, which RBC Law addresses with various strategies, such as greater flex work. “We don’t have hard quotas here,” says David. “Rather, we have high goals and exert moral suasion.”

RBC Law has a long-standing summer mentorship program, aimed at giving marginalized students real-life law experience. They have also developed a lawyer exchange program with an aboriginal organization.   

Earlier this year, David was one of 40 general counsel that formed Legal Leaders for Diversity and Inclusiveness to drive diversity in Canadian law departments and purchasing practices. Expect more on this in a future blog post.

As a senior RBC leader, David participates in a reverse mentorship program in which he mentors a diverse manager from another department in the bank. But, here is the twist: The mentee also mentors David on how to look at the bank through her eyes — both the opportunities and challenges. David believes this program sensitizes RBC leaders to what’s needed to break down diversity barriers.

RBC Law also expects diversity from its external firms. “Canadian firms are trying, but still have a ways to go in catching up to the US firms that can rhyme off their diversity stats at a drop of a hat,” says David. “We understand the challenges for the Canadian firms, but still exert moral suasion and expect results.” Remember the “velvet hammer” touch I mentioned earlier?

I couldn’t resist asking the prickly question: Should a white middle-aged lawyer be fearful of his opportunities at RBC Law when diversity is an imperative? David fixed his steely eyes on me and replied, “No. The diversity process forces management to look and hire beyond their comfort zone. But, the key is always hire and promote the very best candidate.” No argument from me on that one. 

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Daniel Harper is Vice President, Corporate Counsel and Secretary
at Océ North America, Inc. He also serves as president of the ACC Chicago chapter.

Mentor: a wise and trusted counselor or teacher; an influential senior sponsor or supporter.

The definition of mentor certainly lends itself to my perception of what a good lawyer should be — wise (of course), a counselor and certainly influential. So then, as lawyers in positions of influence, should we not devote some amount of our precious time to mentoring young people who express an interest in the law? How do we create a pipeline of good, honest, ethical, smart and intelligent lawyers to take our place when our time is done? We take advantage of our position today to ensure a future for our profession tomorrow. We teach. We mold students. We take advantage of opportunities to show them what lawyering is all about and guide them as they make decisions about their futures. According to Socrates, “The right way to begin is to pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.”   

Lawyers from ACC’s Chicago Chapter participated in a mentoring opportunity this summer with the ACC Chicago Chapter Minority Law Student Summer Internship Program. The program, just completing its eighth year, serves the legal community in several ways: For one, the program places rising 2Ls in internship positions at top notch legal departments in the Chicago metro area, providing students with an invaluable, unique perspective into in-house practice that typically takes years to develop before one enters the coveted offices of the in-house world. Further, the program presents intense personal mentoring to each student regarding all aspects of what it means to be a professional — from interview skills, resume writing, proper attire and interpersonal skills (eye to eye contact, firm handshake, etc.). The students receive feedback and advice worth many years of real-world trial and error, because it comes from experienced people who have already made the mistakes. It also opens the eyes of many people to some of the challenges faced by minority students — challenges that they would not understand but for the relationship with the students. So, in that vein, the mentors may actually become more enlightened than the students as a result of their interactions. Lastly, it creates deep, lasting and meaningful relationships between mentors and mentees, and enhances the reputation of ACC and its members in the legal community.

I think we can all agree that mentoring young people is good for the legal community and the community at large, but what personal benefit will you receive as the result of your mentoring efforts?

First and foremost, you will be making the legal profession better, one person at a time. Mentoring provides you the opportunity to share your values with those entering the profession. We all have a responsibility to ensure our profession continues to maintain the highest ethical standards. Answers to questions the legal professional faces are often not clearly black or white — there is much more gray. Therefore, guidance based on one’s personal experience will help the uninitiated navigate the unknown, avoid mistakes that have been made by the mentor, and answer those questions with a much higher degree of confidence.

Mentoring is a wonderful way to build your own personal network while creating a lasting legacy that will exist beyond your professional life and that of your mentee’s. Part of mentoring is imbuing the mentee with a sense of responsibility to give back to the community. So, as your values are passed to your mentee, she too will pass those values on to her mentee, and so on down the line. Today’s mentees are tomorrow’s leaders, so not only will you have a higher degree of exposure to an emerging talent pool, but you will also be helping people who may one day be hiring people like you!

Mentoring enables you to practice your leadership skills and to receive honest feedback. The mentoring process should include the mentee providing feedback to you. Is she receiving your advice loud and clear? Are there any miscues in the way that you approach the process? How does your style fit with a younger generation of professional? How can you tailor your message or methodology to better communicate core values that are not generationally limited? 

In addition to generational differences, you may also benefit from exposure to a young professional that may have a richly diverse background from your own (e.g., a different race, religion, personality style, economic background, national origin, citizenship, etc.). They are also excellent teachers in new media and technology trends, and they can help you improve your skill set.

“Mentoring brings us together — across generation, class, and often race — in a manner that forces us to acknowledge our interdependence, to appreciate, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, that ‘we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.’ In this way, mentoring enables us to participate in the essential but unfinished drama of reinventing community, while reaffirming that there is an important role for each of us in it.” 

Marc Freedman, author of The Kindness of Strangers: Adult Mentors, Urban Youth, and the New Voluntarism

Let’s be honest, you will also feel good about yourself because you are helping someone else be successful. With relatively little investment on your part, you will have imparted a great deal of wisdom (presumably) and experience to a less sophisticated, but equally passionate, new or soon-to-be lawyer.  

If you have an intern or mentee, legal or otherwise, take advantage of the opportunity to enhance the intern’s experience by giving her meaningful face time, and truly serving as a trusted guide and counselor. If you do not mentor someone, then start now. You will provide that person with knowledge drawn from valuable real-world experience that simply cannot be obtained in the classroom.

Finally, as in-house counsel, it is important that our communities know we are hard working, ethical, caring, responsible, enlightened and decent people. Tell your friends and neighbors about your mentoring activities. Let people know that lawyers continue to work hard to make the world a better place to live. You have another fine tangible example of good work to cite in the ACC Program, of how the legal profession reaches out to the community to improve it. It is a demonstrable example of the value system that we in-house lawyers hold true — opportunity, professionalism, ethics and mentoring.   Through this program, ACC Chicago is helping to make great lawyers who will be noticed. The community deserves to know that we are doing our part!

“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.” -Plato

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