If (lawyer = in-house counsel)...
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 …
