Litigation Support

Yesterday we had the pleasure of lecturing to the Wyoming State Bar on "The Legal Implications of Social Media." Somewhat to our astonishment and amusement, we have recently been asked to speak more on that subject than on computer forensics, electronic evidence or legal technology - our core areas of expertise. We certainly have seen a sharp rise in social media evidence in our cases, so these subjects are beginning to be closely intertwined.

In any event, it was an SRO crowd with a lot of judges present. After our three hour presentation (that always seems like a marathon to us), we had the opportunity to speak with several of the judges and got some interesting comments.

One judge noted simply that we had scared the s*** out of him - he had never thought that jurors might be doing Internet research or composing tweets or Facebook posts while serving on a jury.

Another judge observed wryly that he was glad we had started with "Social Media From 10,000 Feet" - we actually had deliberated about this because knowledge of social media fundamentals is growing - but as the judge said, not many judges know a great deal about it, so starting with an overview (including a lot of statistics) was very helpful.

The most comedic response came from a judge who was clearly fairly savvy about social media. He told us with a twinkle in his eyes that he has recently instituted a new policy: Whenever he grants probation, one of the terms is that the defendant must agree, if on Facebook, to "friend" his or her probation officer.

That was a new one for us - we liked it. We hope the judge is including a requirement that the defendant NOT impose any privacy settings which would restrict what the probation officer could see.

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

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