Internet to Evidence Part 3

The second piece that will come up and we are going to talk about the rules of ethics on this but actually couple of ethics opinions out there. And from the other states and I have sighted them in the papers, 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? You know I used air quotes for those peoples listening to the tape. Clean up your Facebook account means go back in and find those posts you made before you talked to me. Cause now I’m 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.

So some of this is to just hit some of those reminders and to kind of—if you are already not doing this like a lot of you are. To put that lens on it of, when I talked to somebody, how much do I really know about them? How much I’m going to learn about them? And once I discover it, what do I do? And at the simplest of levels to get to the punch line, you can learn a lot put their name in and by the way one pro tip if you are not already doing it. After you search their name till I Google page 10, I get tired after page 10, after you have done that I encourage you to try their name plus the word arrest. Just do that. Every once in a while amazing, like every once in a while amazing end the case amazing.

I will also tell you I have ended cases with vine posts, there is nothing like finding the plaintiff, rolling a joint on their bed, laughing about the fact that they just called in for, they going to smoke a nice fat blunt, enjoying some PlayStation 4, that brings an end to a whole lot of cases as you might guess. So don’t under estimate what your folks are putting on the internet, and then again enterprising people will go looking for to find.

So with that kind of out of the way, I want to hit a couple of things. Self-help discovery is really really I’m going to focus on, because you’re not going to be in a position to really get into the mess with the other stuff that I normally talk about. We are going to touch on formal discovery and a punch line to take away from that is social media is not privileged in any way shape or form.

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.