The recent New Jersey case of a lawyer whose excuse for missing a filing deadline was proved false by vacation photos she posted on Instagram is part of a growing body of cases in which lawyers and judges faced scrutiny over their social media postings.

A federal judge in Newark ordered New York attorney Lina Franco to pay $10,000 in sanctions on April 26 after a sharp-eyed defense lawyer noticed that her personal Instagram page showed her vacationing in Miami on the week she was supposed to submit a motion in a wage-and-hour case. Franco told the court she missed the deadline because she was caring for her ailing mother.

As Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms become standard vehicles for lawyers to promote their practices, some seem to be oblivious to problems that could arise when they post online about their work.

Sometimes, attention is focused on social media posts that, on the surface, appear to have no obvious ulterior motive, such as those of Franco and a federal judge in Sacramento, California, who tweeted anonymously about a case he was hearing.

In 2017, Senior U.S. District Judge Walter Shubb maintained a Twitter account, @nostalgist1, at the time he approved a $122 million settlement between the federal government and Sierra Pacific Industries Inc. over a fire that consumed 65,000 acres in a national forest. The account was used to follow the feed from the local U.S. Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the Sierra Pacific case, and was used to retweet a news article about the case that the defense said was inaccurate.

The defense sought to revoke the settlement deal in light of the judge's postings, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused.

Some other lawyers have found themselves in hot water for employing social media in deliberate acts to gain advantage at trial.

In New Jersey, a furor arose over two defense lawyers accused of instructing a paralegal to “friend” the plaintiff on Facebook, in hopes of gathering information about him. John Robertelli and Gabriel Adamo, representing the borough of Oakland, employed that tactic against Dennis Hernandez, who filed a suit after he was struck by a police car. After a District Ethics Committee refused to bring charges against Robertelli, the Supreme Court ordered the ethics case to proceed in 2016.

And in late 2017, plaintiffs lawyers in a suit in state court in Philadelphia over alleged side effects of blood thinner Xarelto faced questioning about postings on their Instagram accounts showing the courtroom with the hashtag #killinnazis. Although there is no evidence any of the jurors saw the postings, defense lawyers in the case maintained that they were intended to link Nazi Germany to defendant Bayer, a German-based company that developed the drug. The defendants are hoping to overturn a $27.8 million verdict in that case.

In another novel use of social media, Centre County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Stacy Parks created a fake Facebook page to snoop on criminal defendants. Parks' fate now lies with the state Disciplinary Board, and ultimately with the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Parks, who created the fake persona of Britney Bella using a photo of her sister, said she did so to facilitate the self-identification of drug dealers, but media reports say she is under investigation by state disciplinary authorities over the novel tactic.

Deciding what's right and what's wrong is a challenge for the courts, which have occasionally upbraided lawyers for their ill-considered online postings. However, some judges have been more forgiving.

In the Ninth Circuit case concerning the trial judge posting online about the case before him, Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sidney Thomas stopped short of telling judges not to blog about cases they are hearing, but warned would-be posters to consider the consequences.

The Ninth Circuit rejected Sierra Pacific's argument that the Twitter posts by the trial judge showed bias and warranted a recusal.

“This case is a cautionary tale about the possible pitfalls of judges engaging in social media activity relating to pending cases, and we reiterate the importance of maintaining the appearance of propriety both on and off the bench,” the court said.