So You've Accidentally Gone Viral?

A Big Sis Briefing on speaking up online when you are a lawyer or you want to be one eventually.

This is career advice, not legal advice. If something has already happened to you at work, get your own lawyer. I mean that literally, not just as a disclaimer.

Every few months or so a video goes up that says the quiet part out loud about working in a profession that runs on discretion. The algorithm decides it likes the sound of that thank you very much. By the next morning the person who posted it is having the worst week of their working life and the comments are usually the least of it.

The real weather comes in privately.

A friend of a friend has seen it. Someone at a firm you have never applied to has an opinion about you. The video stops being a video and becomes a referendum on whether you are still employable or not.

I am writing this from a holiday I was supposed to be spending offline, which should tell you how much I did not want to leave it until September.

The advice on this always seems to arrive after the fact, usually delivered by people who have never posted anything riskier than a graduation photo.

So this is the version I would give a younger sister, beforehand.

Just can’t bloody help myself.

The front page test

Years ago I was in-house at a high profile company going through a period of intense media scrutiny. Delays, customer service failures, the kind of coverage where your employer's name is in a headline every second morning and everyone at dinner has a view about it.

The corporate training that came with that season was relentless and one line from it has never left me. Before you write it, send it, say it or post it, ask what it would look like on the front page of the local newspaper.

It sounds theatrical until you understand what it actually does.

It is a compression test.

It takes the thing you are about to do and runs it through the least generous possible reading, the one stripped of context, tone, history and all of your very good reasons. Most things pass that test comfortably. The ones that do not are usually the ones you were going to regret anyway.

That question has kept me in good stead for fifteen years, through a full time corporate career with an active practising certificate running alongside six years of daily posting online.

It did not make me perfect.

I have been known to run my mouth. On one occasion that carried an internal consequence which was firm, fair and entirely proportionate to my position, and knowing what I know now I would make a different call.

What I had going for me was timing. I was largely under the radar, which meant I could correct course quietly rather than publicly, and I worked for technology companies with more open, progressive leadership at a point when content and podcasting was still unusual in professional life. It was a genuine sweet spot.

That sweet spot has closed.

The spotlight is real now, reach is instant and unless your account is private you should assume every post lands in front of all three of the filters I am about to describe.

Even with a private account, you never really know.

The bit nobody explains at law school

Australia has no constitutional right to free speech in the American sense, which surprises most people the first time they hear it. The second surprise is the more useful one.

What we have instead is an implied freedom of political communication, which the High Court has described as a limit on legislative power rather than a personal right you can hold up in a meeting.

Even where you do have the right to say a thing, that right operates against the state.

It does not necessarily protect you from your employer, from a regulator or from the recruiter who quietly decides your application is “a bit much”.

Freedom of speech has never included freedom from consequences. That is not a loophole in the system, it is the design of the system. You can be completely right, completely truthful, completely within your rights and still lose the job.

A practising certificate adds another layer.

You are not only an employee, you are a member of a regulated profession with conduct rules attached and those rules follow you onto platforms that did not exist when most of them were drafted.

The part that gets missed in the pile-on

The Australian legal profession has not quite figured this out either.

Employee generated content is the largest organic marketing channel most professional services firms will ever have access to and almost none of them have worked out how to hold it thoughtfully and strategically. The instinct is control. Take it down, quietly manage them out and remind everybody that we are typically a conservative and risk adverse group of people.

What that instinct actually produces is a generation of talented young lawyers who post anyway with less support and more risk or who go silent and take their entire personality somewhere else, usually to a competitor with a more relaxed policy.

I have been and mentored both.

Professional bodies have even paid me good money to speak to early career lawyers about exactly this and I will tell you what I tell those rooms: the firms that win the next decade of talent are the ones writing a sensible, human social media policy now, not the ones drafting a takedown email at 9pm on a Sunday.

Everybody is learning here but some institutions are simply learning faster than others.

That is my systems critique, which is satisfying to write and no help at all when you are the one holding the phone.

So, let's get 🎶 practical, practical 🎶

Four documents, before you post

If you are employed and admitted, or on your way to admission, there are four key documents that may govern what you can say publicly:

1. Your employment agreement. Confidentiality clauses, disparagement clauses, intellectual property, occasionally a social media clause tucked into the miscellaneous section at the back.

2. Your employer's policies. Social media, media contact, code of conduct. Policies are usually incorporated into your employment by reference, which means they bind you even though you skimmed them on day one between the fire drill and the coffee machine tour.

3. Your law society's guidance. Every state body has published something on social media use by practitioners. It is free, it is boring but it is exactly what will be quoted back at you.

4. The solicitors' conduct rules. In particular the obligations not to engage in conduct likely to diminish public confidence in the profession or to bring the profession into disrepute. I have long suspected that those phrases remain broad on purpose.

Read all four before you need them rather than after. No excuses on this one, okay?

The three filters

Once you know what governs you, the decision itself comes down to three questions.

These are the ones I ran everything through while I was employed and what I recommend now. If a post passed all three, I posted it.

What would my CEO think?

Not your work friend, not your immediate team. The person at the top who has to answer for the whole organisation and who does not know you well enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. This filter catches commercial and reputational risk, the stuff that is invisible from your home office.

What would my mum think?

The care test. Would the person who loves you most wince, not because you were wrong, but because you were cruel, careless or unrecognisable as your best self. Most posts that age badly age badly on tone rather than accuracy, which is why this filter matters more than people expect. Are you posting or processing?

What would the Law Society think?

The regulator reading it cold. No context, no goodwill, no knowledge of what you had been putting up with, holding your words against the black and white conduct rules.

The three are deliberately different lenses.

Something can sail through two of them and fail the third, which is precisely the moment you find out what you are actually risking.

If you are unsure, sleep 👏 on 👏 it 👏.

👏 👏 👏

The post will still be there tomorrow and the version of you that has slept is a far better editor than the version of you that has just been humiliated in a meeting by that bish again.

What the backlash can actually look like

Nobody warns you about the texture of it but you know I will.

It is rarely loud.

In Australian legal circles anyway, it arrives as tone.

Snarky, insidious, quietly judgmental, delivered as faux or real concern for your career by people who have never met you. It is a comment that says "interesting" with a full stop. It is a partner mentioning your name at a table you will never sit at. It is a little schaudenfraude and maybe even a sprinkle of classic tall poppy cut down.

That is not a personal failing on your part. It is, in my experience, a group of people with an unusually high tolerance for private cruelty alongside an unusually low tolerance for public honesty.

The other thing to understand is what triggers the real ferocity from institutions and companies. People do not fight hardest over principle. They fight hardest when money, reputation or a business is perceived to be under attack and a professional services firm is all three of those things wearing a puffer vest and a pair of RM Williams’ boots.

We are going to talk anyway

The pressure valve for all of this is not more silence, it is anonymity and I expect we are about to see a great deal more of it to come.

Accounts like The Aussie Corporate and Corporate Bish, subreddits like r/AusCorp, all running on anonymous submissions from people who want the truth, or at least their perception of it, in circulation without their name attached to it.

None of this is new. It is the same instinct that built RollOnFriday, the Eagle St Gossip Girl era of 2011 and the Whirlpool forums, all updated for a generation raised on video.

Workers talk. Workers have always talked.

The only variable is whether the talking happens in a pub, in a forum or in front of two hundred thousand people and firms have far less control over that variable than they believe.

There can still be consequences, including for anonymous accounts and for the people who submit to them. Anonymity is a thinner shield than it feels like from the inside.

If it has already happened

Take a breath first because plenty of people have come through this.

Get your own employment lawyer. Not your friend from law school who does property now, an actual employment lawyer. Many offer a free or low cost first consultation.

Know the clock. Unfair dismissal and general protections applications in the Fair Work system run on very short deadlines, in some cases a matter of weeks. Find out what applies to you immediately, well before you decide whether to use it or not.

Preserve everything. Emails, messages, policies, meeting invitations, your own posts. Screenshot before anything gets deleted, including by you in a vulnerability hangover.

Do not post the follow up video yet. Every additional post narrows your options while anything is unresolved. Get advice on the second video before it goes up rather than after.

Say less publicly while you decide. Silence is reversible but a post is not.

Play the game, play smart

The ending I want to leave with you as food for thought is that this is all a trade rather than a rule.

If you decide to create public online content, with your name attached to it, asking hard questions or sharing real opinions and experiences, what you are actually weighing is your current career direction, your temperament, your capacity to be perceived and judged by strangers and how much of an internal rebel streak you are working with. Those four things are personal. They are not a moral scale and nobody else gets to set them for you.

You can build a career on saying true things out loud. You may reach fewer potential employers doing it but the ones you do reach will be more your people anyway.

You can also keep your head down, build quietly and use your influence later from the inside where the levers are. Both are legitimate paths, of course they are, and anyone telling you there is only one right way is selling you their own comfort and desire for stability and structure.

You can absolutely thread this needle, it just requires you to go in briefed.

Four documents read, three filters applied, one night's sleep between the feeling and the post and a clear head about what you are trading.

Careers are long, this too shall pass, the internet is forever and all three of those things are true at once.

Some of you will make that trade and some of you will not. Both are fine.

Your creativity and desire to share your experiences is not the problem. Going in unbriefed can be.

Mel

💖