On Tuesday, as the actor Roseanne Barr grappled with the public outcry over an offensive tweet that drove ABC to cancel her eponymously named show, she returned to Twitter to apologize and offer excuses. It was Memorial Day, she said. It was early in the morning. “I was ambien tweeting,” Barr told her followers.

Barr's reference to Ambien, the signature insomnia drug from the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, set off a wave of social media commentary and news stories about the medication. And it set off a dash inside the U.S. offices of the French drug company about whether—and how—to respond.

Sanofi's in-house leaders decided not to sit back and let Twitter do all the talking, Chan Lee, the company's top lawyer in North America, told The National Law Journal in an interview Thursday. The communications team saw Barr's tweet and wanted to make sure one of its products wasn't going to be used as a “crutch” to explain away the racist post.

The company posted this now-famous response through the @SanofiUS account:

“People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world. While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”

Barr later deleted the tweet where she mentioned Ambien. In follow-up tweets, she said: “I blamed myself. Not ambien.”

We spoke with Lee about how Sanofi's widely acclaimed response came about. The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

NLJ: How did the draft tweet get to your desk and what was your thought process as you vetted it?

Chan Lee: I think it reached my level in the interest of time. To be effective in social media, we need to be timely and it was a way to get timely approvals from legal, regulatory and other functions. In terms of my thought process as I reviewed the tweet, it was not so much specifically from a liability standpoint but more from a reputational standpoint. Is this statement consistent with our values? Clearly one of our core values is diversity and inclusion. And unwarranted attribution of one of our products for what we view to be racist comments was inappropriate. We felt we needed to take a stand and speak out against it.

How closely did the draft tweet match what ultimately was posted from Sanofi's official Twitter?

Rather than going through the wordsmithing internally, [I'd say] the tenor of their message was spot-on. It received very quick approval.

How many people were involved in the review?

This effort was led by our very capable communications team. I couldn't tell you how many colleagues from communications were involved in thinking through one, whether we ought to respond, and two, once we made the decision that we should, how should we best do that?

I was the lawyer that approved it. I thought about consulting others, but again, I was acting in the interest of time.

Did you consult any outside lawyers?

I did not on this particular matter. I think when we bring in outside lawyers, it's part of our proactive counseling—trying to anticipate some potential crisis and how we would manage through that. Not that this was a crisis. But given the time aspect of going out there, I think that we just really did not have the time to vet this with too many other lawyers.

Looking back, with 20/20 hindsight, do you feel any lessons were learned or anything you would have done differently?

No, we're pleased with the overall reaction to our tweet. We're pleased that our external audience understood Sanofi's position on this—the importance of diversity and inclusion for our way of doing things. So I would not change anything about the internal process to get it approved or the content of the tweet itself.

Many companies are pre-emptively putting together social media response plans to be prepared for disparaging tweets, particularly those from the sitting president. Before yesterday, was a concrete response plan crafted in light of challenges other companies have faced on Twitter?

Our communications colleagues are constantly monitoring the external environment, including social media, to bring to light any statements made about our products. Obviously, it would be virtually impossible to anticipate the various contexts in which our products can be raised. When I spoke about practice crisis management planning, if you will, it's really around areas where one can better anticipate. An example of that is cybersecurity threats. We have engaged law firms to talk through those areas and try to develop a concrete plan. For responding to various social media messages about our products, it would be very difficult to plan for. But we do, as you can tell, have a very capable team who can react to them in a very timely fashion.

As you were vetting the tweet, what were the legal considerations—the questions you felt you had to ask yourself?

Typically the questions that I ask myself on tweets like this: One, is it truthful and nonmisleading? Two, is it consistent with our values? Three, is there a possibility of legal liability and how would we mitigate that? So those are the key questions. The approval of that tweet was a fairly easy one for me.

In many cases like this, companies have to worry about alienating customers. That's led companies to a number of different places. Patagonia, for instance, has been public about its efforts to fight certain moves the Trump administration has made. With Roseanne Barr, you certainly weren't dealing with the president. Nonetheless, did any political considerations or concerns about regulatory retaliation come into play?

I don't think we were looking at this tweet through a political lens. Clearly, we have colleagues of various political affiliations working at Sanofi. The context in which we were looking at this tweet was Ms. Roseanne Barr's statement relating to one of our products and our view that that was an inappropriate kind of justification, if you will, of her statements.

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