Wednesday, February 23, 2011

New Litigation Skill: Facebook Stalking

Recent articles detail how attorneys now routinely search for information about potential jurors on the internet. These articles are summarized well by a Forbes blog post. The gist is that, if you have lax privacy settings on Facebook and you are called for jury duty, expect jury consultants or paralegals to analyze your Facebook page (at least if there are enough resources devoted to the litigation to pay for someone to do that sort of work).

This should not be too surprising. Law firms have hired jury consultants to do similar work for years, and everyone in the legal industry should already be aware of their Facebook privacy settings. But one wonders if this news will cause people to remove their Facebook privacy settings and post outrageous statements online, in hopes of getting out of jury duty.


Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

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