SMC Seattle Workshop: Social Media & the Law

Thursday, I participated in an all-lawyer panel with Madhu Singh, Rebecca Yoshitani and Venkat Balasubramani. The event was a workshop on social media and the law, organized by Maya Bisineer for the Social Media Club Seattle and hosted at Summit Law by Richard Wood.

(Photo by Richard Wood.)

It was a lot of fun. The audience was engaged and peppered us with questions for two hours!

I think all of us feel that because social media is having such a relentless series of impacts on how we conduct business, the law must be keeping up, or at least running to catch up. Well, while you can point to legislative adaptations (some smart, many misguided), the law of social media for the most part consists of old laws being applied to novel situations. 

If I might venture a to express a consensus of the panel, that means, big picture, go ahead and make some mistakes (and if that sounds too radical, then tell yourself to "use common sense!").

The line of the night was Venkat's: "Don't let the lawyers commandeer your social media efforts."

I think the success of the event was directly related to how Maya Bisineer prepared us and curated the evening. It felt like the whole room was participating, and the panel ended up being almost a respondent.

When I got home, fresh off the energy and excitement of the discussion, I revisited and re-wrote my post of Thursday morning that speaks to some of the themes I presented.

And here's a slide I discussed last night, one that Maya particularly liked :)

And here's a copy of the livestream of the event: