It’s an incredibly wired world we live in. Over 82% of the adult American population has at least one social networking profile, and in a single minute we’ll witness 293,000 status updates posted to Facebook, more than 360,000 tweets on Twitter, and roughly 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. And while lawyers have yet to catch up with the social media usage of the general population, the rate at which lawyers use social networking platforms has been climbing steadily every year. In-house lawyers are no different; according to a 2017 survey conducted by Zeughauser Group and Greentarget, 73% of corporate counsel report using social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook for professional reasons.
But perhaps the most important question in an era in which attorneys are just one viral post or inflammatory tweet away from the unemployment line or even the disciplinary board, is whether in-house lawyers are using social media ethically and responsibly. As with their counterparts in private firms and government entities, there is no shortage of “cautionary tales for the Digital Age” originating from corporate legal departments.
