Social Media Discovery – Timing is Key

As we’ve previously mentioned, our editor Jim Dedman is now contributing one monthly post to the North Carolina Law Blog.  Yesterday morning, his second submission was published at that site.  The topic: “Social Media Discovery – Timing is Key.” Jim’s post is a response to an earlier blog entry by Ernest Svenson at his Ernie the Attorney blog, which you can find here.  Jim’s post begins:

Timing is everything in litigation. That’s certainly true in the discovery arena, even when dealing with the (still) relatively new field of social media.  Recently, Ernie Svenson a/k/a Ernie the Attorney wrote a fascinating post about the perils and pitfalls of subpoenaing Facebook for an individual’s social media profile and underlying private data.  According to Ernie, Facebook usually refuses to produce a meaningful subpoena response – the good stuff you’re hoping to get will likely not be in the company’s formal response. Accordingly, he offers some alternative approaches to obtaining that data through the formal discovery process. There’s not much to add to his very thorough post; but I would offer the following tips on timing such requests.

Read the rest of the post here.

Once you start issuing subpoenas for social media discovery, you’ve tipped your hand to your opponent.  In his post, Jim offers some suggestions on how to structure and time one’s social media discovery to maximize results and avoid potential spoliation.