What You Need To Know About Social Media And Litigation
- Never say or post anything if it has any possibility of relating to your case. Your best bet is to not post anything at all.
- Never post anything about your case, even if you think no one else can see it.
- Use caution when accepting friend requests from people in the legal field.
- Never accept a friend request from an individual you don’t know.
- If you are represented by an attorney, seek your attorney’s advice before deleting or altering your social media account.
Andy Radhakant and Matthew Diskin, authors of the American Bar Association article, “How Social Media Are Transforming Litigation,” put it best when they wrote:
“The openness of social media — and users’ willingness to tweet and post things they would never dream of saying in a letter or an email — means that social networks offer rich repositories of potential prelitigation intelligence and fodder for cross-examination.”
The discoverability of information on social media sites is an evolving issue. However, any information posted on a social media site that has some relevance to a dispute may be used in litigation.
Sources:
InsideCounsel.com, “#LitigationImpact: The digital frontier of litigation and the explosion of social media”
AmericanBar.org, ” ‘E-Discovery’ and the Undiscovered Territory of Social Media”
AmericanBar.org “How Social Media Are Transforming Litigation“
