Law Donut

I mentioned in Branded Part 2: Donuts and Carnivals, that I was pleased to be a contributor to the Law Donut blog.

My first post for that blog, Avoid April Showers, was a timely reminder for employers to regularly review their employment policies and contracts.  My most recent post for that blog, Licensed to thrill?, is another reminder for employers, but this time with reference to the different licences which are required in a workplace which plays music, television or radio whether for the benefit of its staff or customers.

There are more regular contributors to the Law Donut than me, and they successfully make the Law Donut an excellent source of know-how and discussion on the nitty-gritty of what law and regulation actually means for employers and small businesses.

The Essential Tool-Kit for the In-House Lawyer

Throughout my experience as an in-house lawyer, I've had a requirement for the following 3 items over and above all else:

1. A magic wand (to right wrongs and generally make things not the way they actually are)
2. A crystal ball (to predict the future of course)
3. A healthy stash of contracts that stretch to 2 sides of paper only (I don't know why, but when it comes to contracts, non-lawyers require them to be on 2 sides of paper only.  Its a mystical quality which seems to keep everyone warm, comfortable and happy about any situation with a potential legal repercussion. I'm happy to oblige.)

Today on Twitter, I decided to ask my fellow tweeting in-house lawyers what they considered to be the essential items they needed to get through a day in the life of an in-house lawyer.  I concurred with all of their replies, and  so I'm now pleased to reveal the Official Essential Tool-Kit for the In-House Lawyer:

1. The three items mentioned above
2. A time machine (presumably for situations where the magic wand and crystal ball fail to function as required)
3. A pair of reality glasses to loan out to people as and when needed (so in reality, a huge stash of reality glasses)
4. A "10 minute" gun to shoot someone and they die for 10 minutes (I'm thinking @gamingcounsel was having a particularly bad day when he suggested this item, and I'm sure he doesn't really mean to shoot any of his co-workers)
5. An effigy of a sales manager to stick pins in (heck, we in-house lawyers are displaying a fair bit of pent up rage aren't we?  Although I could write several blog posts on the...hmmmm....challenges which arise between in-house legal and sales.  Yes we're all on the same "company team" but essentially our functions are diametrically opposed and always will be)
6. Two large red stamps (a) APPROVED and (b) DENIED (interesting this one, anything I "deny" tends to land on my desk the next day in disguise if I'm lucky, if I'm unlucky, "denied" activities tend to happen anyway under the cover of darkness)
7. A repeat button (must be hard wearing)

There were some behavioural and physical traits which were suggested as essential also:

1. The patience of a saint
2. A sense of humour
3. Open eyes and ears (I took this to mean alertness.  Pro-plus and caffeine can assist with this)
4. 2 feet and 2 hands (although it did strike me that if we were going to get this particular about the tool-kit, an extra pair of hands and feet and some "go faster" stripes are most definitely required)

Some of the more sensible suggestions also hit a chord, and there was a consistent message that in-house lawyers need:

1. A quiet office (a haven, particularly for the in-house lawyer in an open-plan space shared primarily with non-lawyers who don't always share the same requirement for quiet review of papers or the keeping of matters confidential)
2. A decent PC and a full complement of software and internet access
3. Twitter!
4. The internet (an absolute essential for lawyers operating without access to the informational resource of a traditional law firm library and professional support lawyer team)
5. An accurate, complete and up to date contracts register recording all commercial agreements in the company (plus a paralegal to help run it)
6. Trained co-workers with access to self-help guidance (working on the theory that a stitch in time saves nine)
7. Black's Law Dictionary (I don't know what this is but mention of it it caused quite a stir amongst tweeters on the other side of the Atlantic)

Interestingly, no in-house lawyer mentioned either of the following:

1. External counsel
2. iPads (the one teccy item which is generating a huge amount of road-testing, blogging and commenting on by tech-savvy lawyers the world over at the moment)

Thank you to all of my fellow tweeting lawyers who took the time to share their thoughts with me today on this subject: @richard_russeth @philcylaw @jcasalmir @gamingcounsel @jamesbarnesesq @legalbizzle @jds @TM_Association @AlexandraHa @TMT_Lawyer

I'd love to hear from you if you have any experiences with items in the Essential Tool-Kit listed above or any other items to add to it.

Winner: Follow up on my Shameless Plug Post

It never rains, but it pours; two blog posts in one night after the drought that was May.

So, following up on my Shameless Plug & Follow Up post where I asked you all to click on the link to my blog post for Latitude in the hope that if it was the post with the most hits on the Latitude blog for that month then I would win the prize for the monthly blogging competition......drum roll.......well thank you all very much indeed,  I won!  Even better, an earlier blog post which I'd penned for Latitude and which I'd cunningly linked to in the first (I don't work for a digital marketing agency for nothing) came second.  I won again!

I have donated my winnings from the competition to Save the Children.

I'm a Specialist Plant

I recently realised that I've not blogged a blog post throughout the whole of May.  However, I do have a perfectly good scientific explanation for this.

I'm a specialist plant.

At least, my "preferred roles" are that of a specialist (law) and a plant (a creative ideas person).  More particularly, my "least preferred role" is that of a completer-finisher (..er...there's no easy way to say this, basically I prefer other people to sort out the detail, and I'll get on with the bigger picture).  This is unusual for a lawyer, most of us are archetypal completer-finishers (interested in painstaking detail).  Not me apparently.

In other words, I had an idea about how I could develop my specialism of law....this blog, and then during May (presumably while I had other ideas brewing) I must have assumed that someone else in Team Melanie would get on with the detail of the blog for me.  No such luck!

Well, at least  this is the explanation according to an analysis of my typical behaviours in a Belbin Team Role Profile.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Belbin, he was a Dr who, (not Dr Who, but a Dr who) with a team of researchers in the 1970's, set about observing and recording team behaviours, with a view to finding out why some teams worked effectively and some didn't (assuming a controlled set of resources).  The research identified 9 Team-Role behaviours, and through an incredibly simple set of psychometric questions identifies an individual's preferred, manageable and least-preferred team toles. To have a preference for or against a role is not wrong per se, and the theory does suggest "allowable weaknesses" for each role (for example the conscientious completer-finisher might be reluctant to delegate), but on the flip side, it also suggests weaknesses which if allowed to get out of hand would not be beneficial for the overall team good.

Like DISC (see my earlier post Disc World) Belbin theory is another tool which allows you to understand your own behaviour and those of others in your team.  It also helps team managers to not just build a team made up of a perfectly balanced set of 9 Team Role types, but identify where the potential gaps of behaviour in their team lie and to plan around that accordingly.

I was introduced to Belbin Team Role Theory by the very friendly and helpful Urquhart Partnership, or for more information you can go direct to http://www.belbin.com/.

Volcano Policy

Since the volcanic ash hit the skies of the UK, things have been getting a little dusty. With all those Britons stranded abroad, and at the end of the Easter holidays, this week there’ll have been a few empty desks across the offices of GB.

So employers, what’s your Volcano Policy? Will you require your employees stranded abroad to take the time off work as holiday, paid leave or unpaid leave? What lengths will your company go to return stranded staff back to the UK to increase the work force? Will it depend on whether those staff are currently stranded on business trips or personal trips abroad?

The issue for management of staff absence during Ashgate, are very similar to the issues faced by employers at the beginning of the year with Snowgate. Simple solution is to dust off your Snow Policies and re-brand them, Volcano Policy.

Job done.

Play the advantage

Working in the digital media industry I see first-hand every day the benefits to individuals and businesses from taking advantage of the newest technology, social media and web 2.0.  An industry was born of it, trailblazers lead it, those who participate in it are cutting-edge, engaged with their customers and reap the rewards.  They also have a bit of fun with it.

Hold on a minute….what was that you said?  What’s web 2.0?  Ah yes, social media it’s a risk isn’t it, you need rules to prevent your employees recklessly libelling their boss on Facebook. I don't give staff access to social media sites, its counter-productive.  I can’t Twitter, it would be a breach of confidentiality. Anyway, my firm has a website.

Sorry. I forgot. You’re a lawyer. Risk-averse.  You hear "social media". You think "policy". Go on, admit it.

So, I was delighted to read about this excellent symposium being organised by lawyers for lawyers.  It’s a fresh and quirky look at how technology is affecting the practice of law. Sessions include: “Up in the Air and the Cloud”,  ”Would Lincoln get Linked In? Or would he Tweet?” and, my personal favourite, “What’s your Avatar? How social media is changing the way we work and how to take advantage of it”.

If you're lucky enough to be attending this symposium, you just know you’re going to be able to listen to people excited about their subject and come away feeling inspired to get your personal lawyer brand online, out there and competing with the best of them.

Contrast those sessions with an in-house lawyer forum I’ve been invited to recently by a regional law firm. How could I not want to find out: “How to control social media in the workplace”, “How to prevent online defamation” and “How to control your risk online”. 

Yawn.

It gets worse.  An entirely separate conference I was invited to bears the ominous title “The Internet: What can go wrong and how to avoid it”.  It includes sessions entitled “An Online Survival Guide”, “Avoiding Problems” and “How to Perform a Legal Operation”. 

No, I don’t get the relevance of the last session either. But it’s a conference about the internet so….err…I guess it needs some scary sounding items that lawyers can warn their clients about.  Maybe the organiser got a byte from a mouse when he was younger. 

Anyway, I know which conference, I mean, symposium I’d rather be at.  Go on law firms, I dare you, when it comes to social media and web 2.0, be a trailblazer and get your profession excited about the possibilities new technology and media offer us; don’t blow the referee’s whistle, play the advantage. 

Are you talking my language?

The need to use the right communication method to keep in touch with your audience was never better exemplified than in yesterday’s parliamentary wash-up process for the Digital Economy Bill which enticed very few MPs to engage in debate on the subject in the Commons; juxtapositioned against the tirade of simultaneous Twitter debate at #debill from the outraged constituents of those MPs who will be looking for their votes at the general election in just over 4 weeks time.

Here’s another example of an organisation failing to hit the mark with the right communication method for the subject matter. A couple of weeks ago there was a landmark judgement on a case in my industry (digital marketing) and a big player was involved (Google). The law has always struggled to keep pace with technology, and so we love legal developments which do affect us and this was news we’d all been waiting for. Twitter alerted me to the result of the case. I used Twitter to convey the information I had received myself about the judgement, and to find out the information which everybody else had. I had a blog up and running for my company on the subject just after lunch time and, fair dues, several law firms, legal and industry bloggers achieved the same.

On the day, Twitter was invaluable for exchanging information and more importantly current thinking attaching to the issues which were raised in the case. Given the case related to the digital marketing industry, the real time communication was all the more appropriate.

Two days later, I received an e-mail from a law firm with the heading “Breaking News”. “How exciting” I thought “What a busy week this is turning out to be for new legal developments...

 Oh the disappointment! The e-mail contained a briefing of the judgement from 2 days prior. It contained no insight or new angles on the case, and was clearly not in touch with the comments about this judgement case which were circulating on Twitter, the blogosphere and the industry generally.

In my view this was not breaking news. Technically, it was not even yesterday’s news. It would have been hard-pressed to be that day’s fish and chips paper.

Law firms, take note! and engage more actively with your target audience, use the tools which we use to communicate your message and you’ll have our attention. We may even talk back to you. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

Shameless Plug & Follow-up

A shameless plug for the blog post which I wrote for Latitude earlier this week, Google off the hook, but is anyone else left on it? following the judgement from the ECJ on the 3 Google Adwords cases referred to it from the French courts.  Please click on the link, because if I'm the employee with the most clicks on  the Latitude blog this month I could win the monthly blogging competition :-)

Plug over.

Now for the follow-up:

Obviously this isn't the result which trademark proprietors were hoping for, and since writing that post I've seen a number of reports in the blogosphere suggesting that enforcement costs for protecting brands online will rocket (see in particular this post from World Trademark Review).  We'll just have to wait and see if the price per click of branded keywords does increase, but I think to say that the costs of enforcement will rocket is perhaps a knee-jerk reaction because:

(a)  What this judgement does is further clarify what type of activity does and doesn't constitute trademark infringement, and clarity can only be a good thing for all parties concerned, and so there should be, per se, less infringement.  When we have the ruling in M&S v Interflora, we'll have even more clarity.

(b) Doubtless there will be some advertisers who take advantge of the ruling, but likewise there will be those who don't.  For instance, in terms of online advertising, some sectors are more sensitive to searches against generic keywords rather than branded keywords (eg "car insurance").  Indeed, individual advertisers also take their own ethical stance in whether or not they use competitor's trademarked terms as keywords in their own advertising campaigns.

(c) What trademark owners should consider are the other ways in which they can boost their online presence, such as through improved content (price per click is not the only factor which affects the placement of a sponsored ad) and organic search results.

Lots of analysis and views to digest still, I particularly enjoyed reading Eric Goldman's analysis of the ruling Google gets favourable ECJ opinion, but will it prove a hollow victory? and IPKat's summary of comments on the 3 cases.

CAPping it off: The digital remit extension

This week the Advertising Association announced that the advertising industry recommends the remit of the CAP Code be extended to cover all online marketing communications including social media.

It’s anticipated that this will be achieved by Autumn 2010, but the move needs to be ratified by CAP and will be subject to appropriate consultation with the industry first.

The existing Code covers paid for marketing communications online (such as PPC, display banner advertisements, preferential rankings on price comparison sites etc), and so the proposed extension to all online marketing will require a change in the mindset and awareness of online publishers of any marketing communication to ensure their communications do not fall foul of the Code.

This is great news (albeit a perfect example of how the law takes a little while to catch up with how consumers and businesses use technology). Some initial thoughts and questions from me:

• What will constitute an “online marketing communication”? It’s easy to identify a stand-alone PPC or display banner advertisement as a piece of advertising, but the line can become blurred when the format changes. For instance, an online “infommercial”, which presumably will be caught as similar are caught in the offline environment. But where will the line be drawn? Or will a line be drawn at all? Arguably a company’s entire website could be classified as a marketing communication as the primary purpose it serves is to promote a business and its brand.

• Articles and “press releases” are regularly submitted to search engines and online directories for the purposes of search engine optimisation and are prepared with the expectation that the content will only be “viewed” by the search engines for the purpose of increasing the organic search ranking of the website in question, rather than be viewed by individual consumers. That expectation won’t change, but these documents will potentially fall under the extended remit.

• The inclusion of social media is the most important proposed change to the Code as there is a clear engagement and influence between consumer and marketer with this type of online marketing communication. A company’s marketing activity on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and all manner of blogs and interactive communication portals will need to be managed more carefully to ensure content does not fall foul of the Code. This will be a challenge to the mindset of marketers using social media which is per se a more informal and laissez-faire type of communication.

• Social media marketing communications thrive on interaction and user generated content. Will user-generated content be captured by the Code? My initial reaction is no but that’s based on the assumption that user generated content is generated by consumers (whom the Code is aimed to protect) and not the company doing the marketing; but what about where user generated content is generated by representatives of the company posing as consumers or persons recommending that company’s products or services? How will this type of undercover online marketing be dealt with?

• In terms of twitter: Will a company’s entire Twitter stream be captured by the new remit, or just those tweets comprising a branded marketing communication? What about the Twitter stream of an individual associated with a company but who tweets for themselves, albeit their association with the company influences their tweets? If a marketing communication is tweeted, and is non-compliant with the Code, will any re-tweets of that original tweet be treated as non-compliant also?

I'm on consultation watch, and look forward to hearing other thoughts on how the extension of the CAP Code will potentially affect online marketing practices.

5 Twitter Best Practice Tips for In-house Counsel

In my previous post 5 Reasons for In-house Counsel to use Twitter I encourage in-house lawyers to embrace Twitter. Now here’s some best practice advice on making the most of Twitter specifically for in-house counsel:

1. By its nature, Twitter is a personable and informal means of communication, but be careful not to let your professional standards drop. This is particularly important if your Twitter profile identifies you as a lawyer and more so if it identifies the link to your employing company. For instance, whereas a lawyer for a private practice firm might be able to comfortably tweet “worked on defence to a fraud case today” and the lawyer/client privilege is not necessarily breached; but tweeting about your exposure to a fraud case as an in-house lawyer might not be the best PR you could be giving to your company.

2. On Twitter you represent yourself, your legal skills and profession and your employer. How do you balance these 3 potentially conflicting interests? Personally, I manage this risk by running two separate Twitter accounts: one protected account for my personal Twitter feed and a public account for my @in_house_lawyer tweets which I keep strictly professional. (Does this make me a Twitzophrenic?). Other users of Twitter merge their personal and professional tweets side by side. Twitter is a flexible tool, so experiment to find the best way for you of balancing your individualism and professionalism.

3. Twitter is a great information resource, yes. But, as a lawyer, rely on it with caution. No matter how authoritative your fellow Twitterers appear, Twitter is not a source of legal authority. Your information stream is limited to the people whom you follow, their quality of resource, accuracy and currency and also their “take” on a piece of information. Not to mention disseminating all of that into just 140 characters.

4. Connected with the previous point, very often you will see a tantalising tweet luring you to click on a link to a helpful article – you review the full article and then see the date at the bottom, its 6 months old! Twitter prides itself on being “real time” and as such there is an expectation of currency of information to be available on Twitter, and largely that is true, but that doesn’t always manifest itself in tweets and re-tweets of information sources. Top tip: when clicking on a link to a third party PDF or article the first thing you should do is check the date of that piece of information, not forgetting the jurisdiction it relates to (Twitter is a worldwide information stream).

Also beware the tweeters who post links to sites which appear to contain helpful information which is bang up-to-date, but which you then have to pay to download that information. These types of tweets are few and far between, but just one to watch out for.

5. To make the most of Twitter as a networking tool and information resource you need to mange who you follow with some regularity. Don’t feel compelled to follow back everyone who follows you, likewise don’t be offended if someone you follow doesn’t follow you back. Everyone uses twitter differently. The value of Twitter as an information resource for you lessens if your information stream becomes diluted with irrelevant or unhelpful information. Refresh who you follow every once so that you don’t miss out on new Twitter users who it might be mutually beneficial to follow. Having said all of that if a user directs a comment to you, it is Twitter etiqueete (Twitiquette?) to respond, even if you don’t follow that user.

More generally, I recommend reading Twitter’s own best practice tips for general use of Twitter, and The Creation of Twitter Best Practices on Ogilvy PR (an older article (see advice in point 4 above!) but the advice still rings true). I’d love to hear your best practice advice for in-house counsel using Twitter.