The Zoom Call Every Lawyer Is Talking About, But Should Anyone Be Sharing It?
A senior Australian lawyer has become the subject of one of corporate Australia’s most extraordinary viral videos after accidentally leaving his camera on while using the bathroom during a Zoom meeting.
The lawyer was reportedly on a video call with seven colleagues when he carried his laptop into the bathroom, apparently believing his camera was switched off.
It wasn’t.
According to reports, his colleagues watched in disbelief before someone eventually warned him his camera was still on. The lawyer quickly closed the laptop.
Embarrassing? Absolutely.
But what happened next is arguably the bigger story.
Someone recorded the screen. The footage was shared. And it is now circulating through Australia’s legal and corporate community.
The lawyer has not been publicly identified by the original reporting, which said it withheld his name to avoid further embarrassment. The incident is inevitably being treated as another cautionary tale about working remotely: check your camera, mute your microphone and assume technology can fail.
But perhaps the legal profession should be asking another question.
Why are we sharing it?
LawUno Insight
There is an obvious lesson for lawyers here: always know when your camera is on. There is a more uncomfortable lesson for everyone else.
Australia now has a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, which commenced in June 2025. In certain circumstances it can apply to an intrusion upon someone's seclusion or misuse of information where that person had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Whether it applies to any particular recording or distribution depends on the facts and applicable law.
But even putting the law aside, there is a question of professional judgement.
A colleague making an extraordinarily embarrassing mistake during a meeting is one thing.
Recording it, leaking it and forwarding it around the profession is another.
In an industry that talks constantly about ethics, professionalism and respect, perhaps the most important lesson from this story has very little to do with Zoom.
**Someone else's worst professional moment doesn't automatically need to become everyone's entertainment.**