Social Media Policy

Moonlighting: What Is It Like To Do Social Media Work As A Lawyer?

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I had mentioned a while ago in my very first ATL post that some of my work involves marketing. Well, some of that marketing involves social media. As the main social media lawyer for my business unit, I work with our strategic teams to figure out how to make the best use of social media technologies (e.g., Facebook, Youtube, blogs, smartphone apps, etc.). All within 140 characters at a time.

What’s it like? As lawyerly work goes, it’s fast-paced and feels kind of risky and cutting-edge. Kind of like Mission Impossible. You know, like if the movie had a lawyer character whose job it was to make sure that the Tom Cruise character signed a waiver every time he got a pack of explosive chewing gum. Really, even non-lawyers think this social media lawyering work is cool. Granted, the non-lawyers I’m talking about are sixty-year-old gamers who live at home with their mothers. But still!

There isn’t really a standalone body of “social media law,” so a lawyer who covers this area ends up being a sort of jack of few trades. Instead, law in social media involves work which falls into the following basic categories….

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Inside Straight: Why Your Four-Month-Old Social Media Policy Is Obsolete

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Four months ago, you revised your company’s policy on employees’ use of social media. The policy said all the right things: When employees use social media, they should respect the rights of others and treat people with dignity; obey the company’s code of business conduct; maintain corporate confidences; and so on.

Unbelievably, some recent communications from the National Labor Relations Board suggest that each of those provisions (except for the “and so on”) could actually cause your company some labor pains. Why?

Here’s the easy part: The National Labor Relations Act protects employees who engage in “concerted activities” for the employees’ “mutual aid or protection.” Those words apply across the workforce and are not limited to unionized employees. An employee acting solely on his or her own behalf is not engaging in “concerted activities.” On the other hand, consider an individual employee who is working with (or on the authority of) other employees, or is trying to induce a group of employees to act, or is bringing group complaints to the attention of management. The NLRA may protect all of those activities, and an employer may violate the NLRA if it maintains a rule that could reasonably “chill employees in the exercise of their” rights.

What does that mean for the three examples suggested in the opening paragraph of this post?

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