By Justine Rogers and Anthony Song -
Snapshot
- ‘Lawfluencers’, or lawyer-influencers, are permeating online social media platforms and raising questions about their impacts on legal and regulatory systems.
- Lawfluencers operate in contexts with different incentives, constraints, target audiences and conventions, presenting distinct possibilities and risks that need to be considered.
- In particular, lawfluencing creates new challenges to, but also opportunities for access to justice and lawyer wellbeing, while posing certain threats to ethical obligations and quality control.
There is a growing group of lawyers who are now ‘influencers’. These lawyers, mostly in America but now in Australia too, are using online platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to build a following by sharing their expertise and identities in the form of video content.
This article looks at these lawyer-influencers or ‘lawfluencers’: what they are up to, what is behind their emergence and what their arrival means for lawyers’ professionalism.