Social Media Legal Risk and Strategy 2011

Social media and software are of increasing interest to both private and public sector organizations. While these technologies offer exciting new opportunities to share information and to interact with customers, they also represent a new area of risk and exposure for organizations. Some of the potential risks and liabilities that can arise from organizations using social media are; privacy, data collection and security, copyright infringement, defamation and harassment, violation of employment law, violation of advertising law and discovery issues when there is litigation involved.

Now more then ever in-house counsel need to be involved in the setting of policies and enforcement for social media as well as managing the legal issues that arise. Because this is an emerging field and the regulations are having a hard time keeping up with the evolving technologies, it is imperative that in-house counsel dealing with social media for their organization gain best practices and latest strategies in dealing with the different legal risk areas.