Social Media Policy

Risky Business? | Is a social media policy enough? Do law firms need social-media-insurance?

Most social media sites are FREE to partakers, right? WELL, “free” may be cutting too fine an edge, because social media is not exactly free. Company losses from social media missteps and data security breaches can be translated to monetary costs 84% of the time, according to a 2011 survey from Symantec. The top costs [...]

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Can a Law Firm Become a Social Business?

How are you preparing to take your law firm into the “Social Business” era?  Perhaps this is the first time you’ve heard the term used?  Here’s a definition: Social Businesses combine fully integrated sets of tools, channels, and processes with people that embrace and cultivate a spirit of collaboration and community throughout the organization—both internally [...]

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Social Media and Legal Ethics | No New Restrictions, Just Clarification

The jury is (almost) in. We do not, thankfully, anticipate a Casey-Anthony-super-sized-post-verdict outrage when the American Bar Association codifies its Commission on Ethics 20/20 proposed amendments to the Model Rules in 2012. According to the Commission’s recent proposal and report, lawyers are almost certain to avoid any new draconian restrictions on social media activity as [...]

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Just Being Social | by Jay Strother for Legal Management March/April Edition

If you’re looking for the latest “buzz” about social media ethics and professional responsibility for lawyers (and their employees), I highly recommend Jay Strother’s article, Just Being Social, published in the March/April edition of Legal Management, a publication of the Association of Legal Administrators.  In addition to offering an excellent primer on the issues, the [...]

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Managing Social Media in Your Law Firm | The Next Big Thing

We’ve come a long way, baby! Three years ago, when I founded my company Law Gravity, I talked to a lot of law firms about their “plans” for using social media. Their response: “What plans?” There were firms that had a blog or two, but few looked beyond into opportunities presented by other social media [...]

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Do your law firm employees have a right to free speech on Facebook? Legal Case Filed by NLRB

Last week the National Labor Relations Board launched a legal case asserting that employees have a right to free speech on Facebook. It announced that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the [...]

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FACEBOOK: FOR BUSINESS

Instead of just cutting off workplace access to Facebook —the poster child for questionable business networking activity— I suggest you take a step back and get a better plan. Why? Let’s say you’re a lawyer, an accountant, or a sales person and someone in your organization decides that you are no longer allowed to be [...]

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Liablity in Social Media

I write social media policies and guidelines for law firms. Somewhere near the bottom of the 15 point executive summary I include: “Do not criticize the judiciary in any way.”  Seems obvious, right? It gets edited out sometimes. Here’s a word to the wise. The New York Times reported today on an incident where an [...]

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Making a Sticky Social Media Policy

Whether your law firm or organization has two employees or 2000 employees [or partners], having guidelines in place that set the tone for online engagement and protect your clients’, employees’ and the law firm’s well being is probably on your top ten to do list.  The “what” a policy should cover is fairly well documented [...]

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To Block or Not to Block the Social Web at Work.

Does blocking access to social networking sites at the office really work? Are social networking sites the only places of risk for companies and law firms on the new social Web?

Do you know that if your partners and employees can access blogs and other sites that allow commenting, reviewing, or streaming content (e.g. news videos or podcasts), via the firm Internet connection, you are, by default, giving them permission to participate in the social web.

Law firms need viable responses to the new way in which people are using the web. Shutting off access to social networking sites isn’t the last decision you’ll make.

So what should law firm leaders do? Here are a few suggestions that I recommend.

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