Before lawyers go requesting—and searching—through two years of Facebook wall posts, it would be best to brush up on where the courts stand with respect to social media and e-discovery. A recent article on the Socially Aware blog by Reema Abdelhamid and J. Alexander Lawrence does just that. The authors explore “various approaches taken by courts to address social media-related discovery challenges.”
The judgments range from completely quashing broad requests to reviewing sites in camera, the authors note. More than once courts have said “no” when a party demanded broad discovery from social media sites for failure to show relevance to the dispute. Abdelhamid and Lawrence use the example in Ford v. United States, where the U.S. District Court of Maryland rejected the government’s request for a broad social media discovery plan. “The court denied the motion to compel, holding that the government’s request was not narrowly tailored” and didn’t describe the categories of material sought, they explain.
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