Unless you sit on the Supreme Court, you are probably on social media, and if you are a lawyer, the post you dash off at eleven on a Friday night can cost you a client, a case, or a license. The rules of professional conduct were written for a world of letters and cocktail parties. Now the cocktail party has a permanent record.
In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with Nicole Hyland, a partner in the litigation and professional responsibility groups at Frankfurt Kurnit and a veteran of the ethics committees of the New York City Bar and the New York State Bar, to walk through the platforms one at a time — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and yes, Tinder — and the ways each one has gotten lawyers into trouble.
The Myth of the Privacy Bubble
Hyland's first warning is the one most lawyers need: there is no such thing as private on the internet. She describes the mindset she calls the privacy bubble — the late-night post about a difficult client or an exasperating judge that the writer imagines only a few friends will see. Her cautionary tale is a Florida public defender who, during a murder trial, photographed the leopard-print undergarments her client's family had brought for him to wear and posted them with a wry caption. No privileged information was disclosed, but the post reached the judge, produced a mistrial, and ended her job. Disparaging a judge, Hyland adds, carries risks well beyond the case at hand, because the same judge will see the lawyer's partners and colleagues for years to come.
When a Brag Becomes an Ad
The conversation turns to the line between sharing good news and soliciting business. Hyland points to a California opinion that ranked a series of lawyer posts on a spectrum: "I just won a big case" is a brag; "Who wants to be next?" is an advertisement, with all the disclaimer and record-keeping obligations that follow. Twitter, with its character limits and public reach, is where she sees that line crossed most often, and she is candid that linking to a disclaimer is technically permissible and practically a way to lose followers. LinkedIn is the reverse problem: because everyone there has their lawyer hat on, regulators are quicker to treat anything posted as advertising, and a then-recent New York County Lawyers Association opinion had told lawyers to monitor their endorsements at reasonable intervals and hide the ones — trademark law, Westlaw — they have not earned. Listing a practice area, she notes with relief, is not a claim to be a certified specialist.
Friend Requests, Judges, and Paralegals
Some of the most consequential mistakes happen before anyone posts. Hyland explains how the no-contact rule reaches a friend request: in a New Jersey personal injury case, defense lawyers had a paralegal friend the plaintiff to harvest his private Facebook page for the deposition, and found themselves facing ethics charges. Judges are a subtler trap. New York has no flat rule against judges and lawyers being Facebook friends, but Hyland's advice is to unfriend, at least while a matter is pending, because an ex parte communication can arrive from a mutual friend's stray comment without either party intending it. She recounts a judge disciplined for friending a lawyer appearing before her and, when the request was declined, allegedly retaliating — the catch-22 in a single case.
The Question From a Friend
Then there is the acquaintance who asks a quick legal question in a Facebook thread. Hyland walks through what can go wrong: an attorney-client relationship formed without a conflict check, advice on a matter in a state where the lawyer is not admitted, reliance on an answer given without the facts. A profile disclaimer helps, she says, but it will not save a lawyer who then gives specific advice in contravention of it. She closes with the hardest category — the offensive but lawful personal post — and cautions that discipline for conduct unrelated to practice collides with the First Amendment, and that committees should tread carefully.
What to Know Now
Several threads Hyland left open have since been resolved, and mostly in the direction she pointed. The New Jersey friending case ended in the New Jersey Supreme Court, which dismissed the charges on the ground that a lawyer in 2008 could not be held to a modern understanding of Facebook's privacy settings — and, in the same breath, made clear that lawyers today can be. On judges, the Florida Supreme Court held in Law Offices of Herssein v. USAA that a Facebook friendship with a lawyer, standing alone, is not grounds for disqualification, and the American Bar Association reached a similar conclusion in Formal Opinion 488, though Hyland's practical advice to unfriend during a pending matter remains sound. The privacy-bubble lesson has been formalized: ABA Formal Opinion 480 confirms that the duty of confidentiality applies to blogging and other public commentary and covers even information in the public record, and Formal Opinion 496 addresses the newer problem of responding to a client's negative online review, counseling restraint. The largest change is in New York's advertising rules, which the Appellate Divisions rewrote effective June 2026 in a simpler, principle-based form: the "Attorney Advertising" label is no longer required on every communication, a separate specialization rule has been eliminated so that a lawyer may describe a practice concentration so long as she does not claim a certification she lacks, and the blackout period for personal injury solicitations is gone. False or misleading communications remain prohibited, which is the principle Hyland's examples were illustrating all along. And the platforms themselves have shifted — Twitter is now X, with longer posts, and video platforms have joined the list — but the analysis she offers, platform by platform, transfers intact.
