Social media for franchisors

A few weeks back I had a problem with the local franchise of a national pest control company.

Basically, they made an appointment, but failed to show up... without any explanation.

This is the kind of thing I will often moan about on Twitter... even more so if the company has a Twitter account which I can name and shame, which they did. I'm going to call it @BugZappa2000 as the real company did make an effort so sort out the problem and it seemed to be a genuine mistake.

"thanks for not showing up after I waited in all morning @bugzappa2000"

The results of these tweets can be variable. It makes me feel better, but companies who provide rubbish service offline tend to ignore their Twitter feeds too in my experience and on occasions I have even received a load of abuse back.

However, in this case I got a prompt response from someone at head office who pounced on the local franchisee and got them to call me with an explanation of the mix-up and an offer of a free extermination of the offending wasp nest.*

Score one for Twitter customer activism, but if you happen to be a franchisor what a great way of keeping tabs on customer service issues around your franchise network.

There is a a lot of moaning about customer service on Twitter (not just from me!) and by monitoring a few search terms you can tap into it directly without having to rely on franchisees to report issues.

What interests me is that franchise documentation doesn't seem to have picked this up.

Since this episode I have advised a couple of clients who were taking on franchises and the franchise documentation was totally silent about social media.

There are reasons for this of course. Franchisors need consistency across their network and they can't rework their standard documents every time a new social networking service launches. However, they are missing some important issues here:-

• Should franchisees be able to operate social media accounts for their business at all? Do you want @bugzappaWirral, @bugzappaCambridge and all the others or just one national BugZappa social media presence?

• If the franchisee can use social media what user names and avatars should be used?

• Do you need a social media policy for franchisees setting out how they should Tweet?

• Is there an obligation to delete the social media account(s) on termination?

These are just some provisions which spring to mind and I'm sure there are lots of others.

Too often the focus is on using social media for sales, but there are many areas like this where it could provide value to a business in a less obvious way.

Surely there must be some ways in which law firms could use social media other than in the obvious push for new client instructions? If you have come across any good examples please sound off in the comments!

* the wasp infestation trailed off in the end so no extermination was needed... Just in case anyone was worried about the poor insects!

Outliers or Outlawyers?

I'm sure that hundreds (if not thousands) of blog posts have been inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

It has been on my reading list for a while, but I have only just got around to picking it up (downloading it on my iPad Kindle app to be more accurate).

I am guessing most of you have already read the book (or heard about it), but if not then the link above is worth a look - I'm not intending to add yet another review here.

Outliers actually touches on lawyers with a chapter about Joe Flom of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom... and how years toiling away working on the litigation and hostile takeover work which the White Shoe firms shunned left his firm perfectly positioned to dominate when blue chip clients started to demand those services.

This thread of being in the right place at the right time runs through the book. Whether it is Joe Flom and his contemporaries or Bill Gates getting to put in his 10,000 hours on the mainframe at the University of Washington these "outliers" are hugely successful (at least in part) because of this accident of demographics and timing.

So, the important part of this post is a question. Where do you think the UK legal market sits on this "Outliers scale"? Are the senior equity partners at the top tier firms right now the ones who started out at just the right time (with those who are training now having missed the boat)? Or are there opportunities right now for new lawyers to take advantage of technology, Web 2.0 and deregulation of the market to rise to stratospheric heights? Maybe you just think the whole premise is wrong and hard work and dedication will take you to the top whatever.

I know what I think, but I really want to hear what your views are....

Other iPad lawyers

As well as writing about my own experiences of the iPad, I have also been keeping an eye on what others have been blogging about its suitability for lawyers. A quick roundup of the highlights so far:

Jason Plant has changed tack slightly on his No Option for Law Firm blog with a post entitled Stop printing your emails… the iPad's a game changer. Using Adobe Acrobat to turn his email inbox into a PDF folder for viewing on the iPad is a pretty creative idea - although I won't be able to try it without investing a hefty sum for Acrobat 9.

@ljanstis (a new Twitter followee of mine) has also shared his experiences in the iPad and legal practice on his Work Life Law blog, which highlights some interesting drawbacks and benefits. Apparently the most was inspired by an earlier piece by @neildenny on Lawyer1point9. and my own (much less eloquent) ramblings.

Finally, I also stumbled on a higher profile review in The Times by the eminent legal expert Richard Susskind (will lawyers find the iPad useful?). This was probably the least useful contribution and would have been a lot more relevant if it had been written by someone using the iPad in legal practice. For example, anyone who has followed my posts will see that using Pages to edit legal documents (as Susskind suggests) is pretty much a non-starter. Unfortunately, the moderators obviously didn't agree with me and my comment to this effect has ended up on the Times moderating room floor.

I'm sure there are other UK lawyers blogging on the subject so if you know of any then please give me a shout so I can include them!

Social media law part one

What is social media law?

Many lawyers argue that there is no such thing. Other than specific legislation (like the Electronic Commerce Directive) the same laws of copyright, contract, defamation etc. apply to the Internet as in real life.

However, this depends on how you view social media. Is it simply a development of Internet technology? Or is it a paradigm shift, a completely new type of interaction which will eventually drive the evolution of a body of "social media law"?

I'm not saying which side I fall on quite yet, but this is the first of a series of posts in which I am going to look at how the law is adapting to social media.

Rather than writing about abstract theories, I will be looking at the ways my day to day practice is changing to incorporate social media and Web 2.0. In the last post I will round up with my views on how the law is likely to develop (and maybe even answer the paradigm shift question).

To start with, I am looking at something fairly simple: what I call the "social network clause".

This could be used in all kinds of commercial agreements, but a good example is franchise agreements.

Take a situation where you operate a chain of restaurants under the Taco Cottage brand and you want to expand into different cities by granting franchises to new operators.

As well as the usual provisions in your franchise agreement, it might be sensible to include a "social network clause" to set out how your franchisees are allowed (or encouraged!) to use social media to promote their Taco Cottage franchise businesses. This  will be different in each case, but some basic things to think about are:-

• Is the franchisee entitled to create and operate Twitter accounts, Facebook pages etc. using the franchise business name? Are you happy to see Taco Cottage Wolverhampton and Taco Cottage Shrewsbury on Twitter or do you want Twitter users to engage with your own @TacoCottage account?
• Alternatively, should franchisees be obliged to use social media to promote their franchise business? If so, should they be required to feed back details of any successful initiatives to the franchisor for use by other franchisees?
• Who will "own" these accounts and how will copyright in the updates and content provided be dealt with? (the Law Donut blog has an interesting post on the implications of this for employers, but similar issues apply in this kind of situation).
• What social media policies should franchisees have in place for their employees?
• What happens if the franchise is terminated (or sold)? Is there a provision for the social networking accounts to be transferred to a new operator or owner? (By the way, there are real practical issues with this if the login details are held by a franchisee... maybe a service like Hootsuite which allows team collaboration on your Twitter account, but under your control, would be useful).

Franchises are an obvious example, but the concept is just as relevant to dealerships and distributorships, operators of concessions in shopping malls and any other agreement where one party is promoting a business using elements of the other party's intellectual property rights and goodwill.

I have incorporated something like this into a number of contracts recently and I would suggest it to any client entering into this type of agreement.

Of course, if you are the client, and you are having this kind of agreement drafted, then ask your lawyer about including a suitable clause... if they look at you blankly then feel free to point them in the direction of this blog!

Coming up next time around:- social media in mergers and acquisitions.

Is law a creative profession?

A combination of two things inspired me to ask the question.

Jay Shepherd started me thinking about it by asking whether lawyers are artists or labourers. His post started me thinking about creativity, but it isn't actually about that, but about whether lawyers should be paid by the hour for their labour, or whether like artists they should "get paid by the result — by their creation".

The concept floated around in my mind until a few days later, when I was re-reading Stephen King's On Writing - a memoir of the craft. 

Available on Amazon here, this is King's book about his "day job":- language and writing. I like Stephen King's writing so I was an easy sell for this book. I am fascinated by his description of the writing process, but I also think it is a useful little style guide for any writer.

This is the third time I have read it, but the first since I started writing this blog. It struck me that most of his guidelines are relevant to bloggers.

"Omit needless words" (taken from The Elements of Style) is a good starting point, but follow that up with:

"If you want to be a writer [or blogger], you must do two things... read a lot and write a lot."

I don't know if King would look down on bloggers (I hope not, but On Writing is a great resource for them regardless), but my own view is that blogging can be classed as creative writing.

Wikipedia defines creative writing as that which "goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature...". 

Some legal blogging is basically professional literature, but the more interesting blogs I read definitely meet this test:- they step outside this to play with ideas, concepts and language in a way that a law firm press release or legal update would not.

More importantly to me it just feels like a creative process in the way which drafting a Share Purchase Agreement (for example) doesn't. It's hard to say why this is. My gut feeling is that despite the absence of plot and characters you are still pulling together strands of an idea from somewhere and communicating it to your audience as best you can.

One thing I have learned is that being an expert in legal drafting does not help your creative writing. There is a lot of legal drafting and writing out there which is just plain bad, but even the good stuff tends to be focused on precision, certainty and avoiding risk rather than any kind of style. Not that this is a bad thing (this is what we are getting paid for), but it doesn't encourage creativity and it can make it hard to switch gears and write in another style.

I wonder if this is why lawyers (or some of them at least) seem to be such enthusiastic bloggers... it gives us an outlet to write more creatively without having to worry about how our language will be interpreted by a Court?

I would love to hear from some other legal bloggers on this.

Is this kind of creative freedom a factor for you, or is your blog just another aspect of your marketing? Or do you think that law is a creative profession already... that drafting that perfect clause or finding an elegant solution to a client's problem is quite satisfying enough?