Amidst our changing privacy landscape, many marketers are grappling to understand how to appropriately communicate with consumers and collect their data. For businesses that operate across geographies, this can be particularly challenging: communicating with someone in California will require adhering to different rules than engaging someone in the United Kingdom. Even within a country like the U.S., different regions have different laws marketers must follow. 

However, marketers don’t have to face these challenges alone. In the MarTech world, we often speak about the need for marketers and salespeople to collaborate more closely, but what about your colleagues in the legal department? (Disclosure: I’m Acoustic’s Associate General Counsel.) 

Collaborating across marketing and legal will happen for certain one-off needs like the review of a press release. However, marketers shouldn’t view their legal colleagues as a failsafe for their messages, but rather as co-creators of them. Because privacy laws, company policies, and consumer preferences are constantly evolving, we believe this relationship is a critical business partnership.  

Let’s break down how marketing and legal can better collaborate to meet the data privacy and ethics needs of customers and prospects today: 

The legal team’s role in marketing 

At the most basic level, your corporate legal team is responsible for ensuring everything your company says internally and externally is legally correct. While marketing has the job of making messages engaging and exciting, legal must ensure content is accurate, any disclaimers or necessary language is included, and any data collected is done in accordance with the appropriate region’s laws and regulations. If marketers are the gatekeepers of content, legal is the key that unlocks the content and ensures it’s ready to be shared. 

As mentioned earlier, reviewing press releases is one of the most common ways we collaborate (but the relationship should be so much more than that!). Consider bringing your legal team into marketing not just once content is near final, but at the very start of your ideation. 

Any time a financial incentive is offered as part of a marketing campaign, such as contests and sweepstakes, we’re involved to ensure the appropriate terms and conditions are outlined. It helps if we understand the full scope of the campaign and what the goals are to help you market it effectively, but also to ensure the company isn’t vulnerable to any legal action. Legal is key for reviewing all vendor agreements that the marketing department might need; some are mentioned within this article, but there are a multitude of other reasons for marketing to engage legal on other vendor deals. Legal will make sure the company's logo is protected, ownership of deliverables crafted for the organizations (e.g., white papers, or what we call “ideapapers”), and much more.  

Legal should work with the marketing team not only to answer questions on data privacy and data ethics, but also to train on these rules and regulations. We want to ensure the marketing team knows and understands the importance that data ethics and data privacy play in the industry. Knowing and understanding the basics, such as the type of customer data the company collects; necessity of consent, privacy, and cookie notices; if the company has to provide opt-in, opt-out, or both; etc. is a necessity in our evolving landscape of privacy. With such a heightened focus on data privacy and ethics today, this is more than just complying with laws and regulations; this collaboration is crucial to building trust with customers.  

Another major part of our jobs is to collaborate around industry events and conferences. While these were largely paused over the past year and a half, now that the world is beginning to reopen, we can expect in-person conferences to start coming back as well. These are a heavier lift for the legal team than other marketing projects because it requires us to be involved in everything from what’s being communicated to customers and prospects to securing the booth or event space itself to the event insurance and capturing the contact details of attendees. This last piece is particularly challenging: because people come to events from different states and countries, we need to ensure we’re complying with the regional laws for each individual. Being part of the initial planning meetings all the way through the event’s execution will help ensure legal and marketing are working in lockstep to achieve their business goals. 

Forming collaborative relationships 

There are many moving parts when it comes to ensuring legal guidelines are followed without losing the power of marketing’s messaging. But there are a few things each team can do to make this collaboration easier. 

• Get to know your partners on the legal team. We’re approachable, I promise! Every employee should know who is part of the leadership team for your organization, including the general counsel. The general counsel will not be the right person to turn to for every project you have, but they can help direct you to the appropriate contact. If you do not know where to start to determine the leadership team, most companies have an internal site that will list people in the organization, for example, your company intranet, payroll supplier portal (e.g., ADP), or Microsoft Teams. 
• Communicate, communicate, communicate. The more information you share back and forth between teams, the easier it will be for you to collaborate effectively. Sit in on each other’s team meetings — even if something isn’t directly relevant to the project you’re currently working on, it’s good for you to understand the priorities of your colleagues. Share as much content as possible to help give context. Bring legal into the mix as early as is feasible so there are no surprises down the line for what you can and cannot say in your marketing materials. 
• Leverage technology to make collaborating easier. Many companies have deployed technology over the past year to make it easier for teams to connect. Take advantage of the tools around you so you can work smarter, not harder. Use Slack to ping someone with a quick question. Send an email outlining an upcoming event or campaign. Share documents directly with colleagues via platforms like SharePoint. Form open lines of communication so collaboration happens seamlessly. 

At the end of the day, what matters most is that you form internal relationships with your legal colleagues and keep an open mind as you work together. Take constructive feedback and be flexible — you’re both working toward the same goal of growing your business legally and ethically. By viewing the legal team as a business partner to marketing, your brand will be able to communicate accurate information, provide additional protection to prevent legal action, and ultimately, solidify your company as a trusted entity that employees, customers, partners, and prospects can rely on.