Getting From Internet to Evidence
doublehlaw.com
There are all kinds of amazing things you can discover from someone’s laptop and if they are thinking about suing you. A lot of stuff is super useful. As you might guess the law has kind of responded to company’s effort to pry into people’s work computers and on occasions employers might get an overzealous and for example using a forensic experts to fish out the Google password you used to get into your private web based email. Go through it and find out about communications with your attorneys and use those to kill your case.
How many of you as a matter of fact will Google the responsible party in litigation? Right okay. Related question; how many of you as a matter of course and I don’t care if you use Bing or some or some other tool you use, how many of you as a matter of course search Google for your own client? So if you are searching the one you really ought to be searching the other and by the way if you are not searching either, you should totally start. Like you really need to use the tool that is known as “The Internet” to figure out everything you can about both your opponent and your own client early on.
There are actually a couple of ethics opinions out there. And from the other states, occasionally plaintiff’s lawyers have made a mistake of encouraging their clients to “clean up their Facebook posts”. Now do you know what I mean by that? Clean up your Facebook account means go back in and find those posts you made before you talked to me. Cause now I’m a savior and advised you to stop doing that. That are inconsistent with the narrative we would like to talk about. So if we need to present you as the American flag an apple pie and I’ve got a photograph of you on Facebook doing an inverted bear bong stand what you never seen this before actually a feet of gymnastic, actually very impressive. People should be more proud of them than they are. Are you doing this for inverted bear pong stand, that’s not going to play well, you need to get rid of that. Do you know what they call that? Spoliation, that is in fact called spoliation and for some reason it hasn’t fully clicked in the mind of the practitioner that the idea of running out and cleaning up the Facebook account isn’t the will full destruction of relevant evidence.
There is nothing special about it there is nothing unique about it, it is not like there is some law out there that says that social media is private. If you are not aware of how the Internet works, please understand the Internet is very public. What you put on the internet is you are saying everyone can see or 2000 of your closest friends that does not give rise to any expectation of anything other than everyone’s going to know it.
