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e-Bleak House: Twitter "Tweets" Discoverable

By Victoria Pynchon

pimg width="400" vspace="5" hspace="5" height="714" border="5" align="texttop" alt="" src="http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/uploads/image/Bleak_House_title_page.jpg" //p pFrom a href="http://www.lawyersusaonline.com/index.cfm/archive/view/id/432466"E-discovery implications of Twitter/a at a href="http://www.lawyersusaonline.com/"Lawyers USA/a/p blockquote p class="MsoNormal"emThe social networking site Twitter.com allows users just 140 characters to describe what the user is up to ndash; a post known as a quot;tweet.quot;/em/p p class="MsoNormal"emBut lawyers advising clients on e-discovery or /ema href="http://www.lawyersusaonline.com/index.cfm/archive/view/id/432217"emstrongusing Twitter themselves/strong/em/aem need to realize that tweets are discoverable./em/p p class="MsoNormal"emquot;Twitter posts are like any other electronically stored information,quot; explained a href="http://www.bryancave.com/dewinter/"Douglas E. Winter, a partner at Bryan Cave in Washington, D.C/a. and head of the firm's Electronic Discovery unit. quot;They are discoverable and should therefore be approached with all appropriate caution.quot;/ememThe increasing popularity of Twitter has made electronic discovery even more complicated./em/p /blockquote p class="MsoNormal"strongemLitigators!nbsp; Remember, you and your opponent(s) have a choice. /em/strongIt's not only in a href="http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/2008/12/articles/arbitration/arbitration-and-ediscovery-make-up-your-own-law/"arbitration that you can make your own law/a, but by way of stipulated case management orders cooperatively crafted with an eye toward relative cost and likely benefit (ask me for a template!)/p p class="MsoNormal"I don't need to tell emyou /emthat emclients are cutting back in 2009. nbsp;/emThe litigation practice that thrives will be the most efficient and effective dispute resolution vehicle on the road./p p class="MsoNormal"And now, for your moment of zen - Charlie Dickens.embr / /em/p blockquote pem strongJarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means./strong The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless. /em/p pem Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was quot;in it,quot; for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port- wine committee after dinner in hall. /ema onmouseup="document.cookie='lastnode_id=0; ; path=/'; 1;" title="Articled clerks" href="http://everything2.com/title/Articled%2520clerks" class="populated"emArticled clerks/em/aem have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, quot;or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowersquot;--a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses. /em/p pem How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery /ema onmouseup="document.cookie='lastnode_id=0; ; path=/'; 1;" title="folio" href="http://everything2.com/title/folio" class="populated"emfolio/em/aem-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle--who was not well used--when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right. /em/p pem Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. /em/p /blockquote p class="MsoNormal"nbsp;/p p class="MsoNormal"nbsp;/pimg src="http://feeds.lexblog.com/~r/SettleItNowNegotiationBlog/~4/487733980" height="1" width="1"/

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on December 17, 2008 (boomark / email).