Litigation Support

After a hiatus in New Hampshire, I've gone through the virtual mailbox and assembled some of the responses to my recent post on the defensible collection of social media data in e-discovery.

Colleage Mary Mack, Corporate Technology Counsel for Fios, Inc., wrote me as follows:

Hi Sharon,

I am working on this for the West book and a presentation I will be giving for the National Federation of Paralegal Associations.

THERE IS NOTHING OUT THERE ON THIS, no kidding.  Except, ethical issues for lawyers and how tos and dangers.

You might look at Smarsh and iCyte.  And the Library of Congress for Twitter!

As I compile a better list I will send it on.  There are a lot of reputation management and social media analytics platforms that can be aligned toward a defensible collection, but I have yet to vet them. 

Please let me know what you find, it will help me too.

Mary

Friend and frequent co-presenter Browning Marean (a partner at DLA Piper) also suggested the use of iCyte. Thanks Browning.

Ron Weiss, from Blue Cross Blue Shied of IL, TX, NM, OK, wrote in part:

I like to do screen and video captures of an account as my first pass of reviewing what is in it.

I have started doing packet captures of any and all sessions where I review, search, collect, and\or delete data from these sites.

Searches conducted show before and after results.

Use of Adobe Acrobat or other PDF software to create exhibits of key issues.

Working to create searchable archives. Some sites offer back up utilities or there are sometimes third party utilities.

Basically everything is documented with some sort of visual capture method, a print to PDF method, and network capture. All results have a best evidence copied made and stored in hashed digital container and a working copy is made.

Finally, Brian See, a partner with Williams Mullen, wrote me in part:

Good old fashioned wget has worked fine for many of our collections, as has renderings straight from the browser to PDF (with the PDF then hashed and treated like any other doc in our productions).  In a recent case, I've had the luxury of being able to plan for the client to authenticate the website rendering ("Q: Mr. Smith, do you recognize this document?  A: Yeah, it's a printout of the website.") rather than having one of my tech guys do it.  Wget logs are nice because that gives you additional chain-of-custody information, but, like a lot of other chain-of-custody stuff, if you're relying solely on that to get your evidence admitted, you may have other problems.

In previous cases, I've scraped Yahoo Groups and then parsed the message fields into something that could be imported into databases.

We have an ongoing matter involving a YouTube video in which the case team felt it was worthwhile to have us run a script that downloads the .FLV file on a periodic basis (to verify that it's still up).

Thanks to all who wrote. This area remains uncharted territory with virtually no guidance yet from the courts. We have kept a close eye on this new terrain and will explore why in my next post.

In the meantime, the sun in New Hampshire is still shining and I am not yet the color of a "lobsta," so I'll go enjoy the weather until my customary white to red transformation has taken place. It is maddening to be married to a Japanese man who tans instantly. Life is altogether unfair.

E-mail: snelson@senseient.com    Phone: 703-359-0700

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