Michael Epps Utley 
Do you want your employees to share news and content and demonstrate their expertise on LinkedIn but are worried about them posting things that could be inappropriate, violate social media or legal industry standards, or misrepresent your brand?
It’s a common concern for law firms and legal professionals.
This guide explains how law firms can develop social media standards to govern how employees post on LinkedIn and other social platforms.
Employee Social Advocacy: Why It Matters
Employee advocacy on social media is especially critical for law firms. People are distrustful of what organizations have to say about themselves. If employees are willing to say their law firm is a great place to work and to work with, it sends a powerful signal to prospective clients considering hiring it.
Beyond this, sharing unique perspectives, interesting ideas, and authoritative legal content on LinkedIn helps demonstrate that the lawyers and other professionals working for a firm know their stuff. It’s a great way to build trust with prospective clients. It also helps differentiate your law firm and explain what makes it unique and its areas of specialization.
How Social Media Guidelines for Law Firms Are Changing
Your employees will talk about your company on social media whether you want them to or not. They have a federally protected right to do so.
Many law firms respond to this with fear and develop extensive and burdensome restrictions around what employees can or cannot say and post online. They require them to sign on to a list of don’ts without further conversation.
However, leaders at forward-thinking legal organizations increasingly prioritize employee advocacy and social media presence because of their benefits.
The proper social media guidelines act as guardrails for online activity. They demonstrate to employees you want them to be active online, helping to build your firm’s social media presence. Modern social media guidelines are more about “dos” than “don’ts.”
How to Develop Social Media Guidelines for Your Law Firm
The length of your company’s social media guidelines is far less important than their quality and accessibility to the people on your team. Long, complex guidelines are a major turn-off for most people. Ensure employees at every level, from new paralegals to senior partners, can understand and value the guidelines. Break things up by developing one-pagers or cheat sheets for specific social media activities, like posting white papers or images of team members.
All employee social media guidelines for law firms should include the following:
Firm’s reason for being on social media. Document your firm’s purpose for each social platform with a particular focus on LinkedIn, the most valuable one for legal professionals. Whether for recruitment, content sharing, or demonstrating expertise, the guidelines should explain why the organization is on each platform and how employees should support that purpose. If you can’t make a clear case for any social platform, it could be time to abandon it.
Social media style guide. List trademarks and anything else required so employees correctly present the brand and firm. You should also define your brand personality, tone of voice, attributes, and critical messaging considerations.
Ready access to a shared brand asset folder. Create an online place where employees can access company logos, how-tos, FAQs, branded social media templates, and more. Consider developing a list of hashtags and when to use them. Keeping these things in a central place makes employees more likely to use them and stay on brand.
Legal concerns. Make it clear what is approved for social sharing and what is not.
Review process. Publish information on the types of posts and content that must be reviewed by the company and how to get it done.
Don’t limit your guidelines to these elements. Work with your team to identify critical concerns to address in yours.
Tip: Consider creating a social media request form that makes it easy for team members to suggest new posts and content. A conversation before posting is better than an urgent request to delete a rogue post.
Educate Employees on Social Media Guidelines
When you launch your guidelines — and as part of every employee’s onboarding — a social media team member should explain the firm’s policies and guidelines.
Leverage these tactics to increase employee support of social media and the guidelines:
Host lunch-and-learns. These informational events allow employees to enjoy a company-supplied meal while discussing topics related to your firm’s social media efforts.
Hold social media office hours. Some employees may be hesitant to ask questions in public forums. As an alternative, provide them with one-on-one time by hosting regular office hours with your firm’s social media guru.
Send social media sharing emails. Regularly email content you would like employees to amplify on social media. Include suggested post text and images to make things easy for busy employees. You can’t require employees to post to social media, but recommending content and making it easy to do so will increase activity.
Launch a social-media-specific Slack or Teams channel. If your organization does other work on these tools, share all your social content and information there as well.
Employee Social Media Guidelines for Law Firms: The Final Word
Social media guidelines have evolved from highly-limiting “don’t” documents to empowering “dos.” Leverage the information in this article to create guidelines that turn employees into social advocates and active posters.
