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Celebrities: They're just like you and me. They have off days. They say dumb things on social media. They can get into legal trouble. They get confused about what's an issue and what isn't.

But there's perhaps one small thing that separates me from Kim Kardashian. When I tweet, about 300 people see it. When she tweets, a follower count greater than the population of Spain sees it. And that can lead to some interesting legal problems, as well as ethical quandaries for her attorneys looking to manage it all.

Relativity Fest 2017's “Celebrity Law, Tech, and PR: Legal Ethics in News and Social Media” panel broke down some of those ethical quandaries, featuring celebrity attorney (including for the aforementioned Kardashians) Michael Kump of Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert; former government attorney Stan Simpson, now a senior ethics counsel at The World Bank; and noted e-discovery attorney David Cohen of Reed Smith. Relativity's David Horrigan moderated the panel.

What Ethics Issues?

At this point, many lawyers know that when social media communications occur, ethics issues may follow. Just look at the result of 2011's Lester v. Allied Concrete, where Facebook spoliation resulted in a loss of $700,000 for the plaintiff and sanctions for the attorney who instructed him via a paralegal to remove incriminating Facebook posts.

However, when celebrity status becomes involved, those issues can be magnified. “It's like ethic rules on steroids,” Cohen said. “It's one thing to run afoul of ethics rules on everyday cases, but don't make mistakes in cases involving celebrities, because the world will learn about it.”

Cohen ran down some ways that the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct shift when celebrities become involved:

Rule 1.6 — Confidentiality of Information: “It's especially important to protect information in a celebrity context. People are after that information,” Cohen explained. As an example, he pointed to a recent case where attorneys for President Donald Trump were talking loudly in a restaurant about his affairs; a New York Times reporter happened to be sitting nearby and published the conversation. This sort of information leakage can cause irreparable damage to a celebrity client if the wrong information leaks.

Rules 1.7 and 1.8 — Conflicts of interest: “In the case of celebrities, there's a special kind of conflict, and that's the interest of the lawyer in gaining notoriety for him or herself against the interests of the client,” Cohen noted. One example is the legal counsel for former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, accused of sexual assault of multiple children. His lawyer thought it was a good idea to let Bob Costas talk to him on national TV, perhaps for personal publicity, Cohen posited. That transcript was later used in court against him.

Rule 3.1 — Meritorious claims and contentions, and Rule 4.1 — Truthfulness in statements to others: “You have to be careful about what you say in litigation,” Cohen explained. One recent high-profile example occurred when Mark Geragos represented singer Kesha against music producer Dr. Luke, whom she accused of sexual assault. Unfortunately for him, Geragos used Twitter to insinuate that Lady Gaga also had experienced harassment from Dr. Luke, a charge she denied. Despite what Cohen called “some weak defenses,” he was forced to submit to a deposition, and Kesha dropped him from her legal team.

Rule 3.4 — Fairness to opposing party and counsel: Everybody has a right to pertinent information, but obtaining that information can become tricky with celebrities. In one case involving the band Lynyrd Skynyrd, former members of the band sued former drummer Artimus Pyle over breach of contract. Although Pyle's attorney wasn't a party in the case, the judge ruled that the attorney switching phones and losing key texts constituted spoliation. “This seems to extend legal hold law in how far you have to go in order to protect information,” Cohen explained, adding that this rule may differ by jurisdiction.

Rule 3.6 — Trial publicity: “Lawyers shouldn't make extrajudicial statements that will be given publicity and have the potential to prejudice the case,” Cohen explained. But, he added, “Many lawyers rely on part (c) of the rule—basically that if the other side says things, you can say things to balance the scale.” Here, he gave the example of former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was criticized for publicly saying that Sheldon Silver was using public office to line his own pockets. The defendant moved for dismissal, and while the judge stopped short of dismissing, he was critical of Bharara.

West Coast Celebrities

So with that in mind, what happens practically for attorneys when these issues pop up? Kump gave his own experience in an earlier, high-profile celebrity case: the divorce between Los Angeles Dodgers owners Frank and Jamie McCourt, the latter of whom he represented.

The case turned on a document issue: Although the marital contract his team was given said that assets were shared “exclusive” of the Dodgers, he found that the pair had actually signed two documents, with the other replacing that word with “inclusive.” Kump said, “It was literally one of those moments where you think, 'Are my eyes working properly? This can't possibly be.'”

This discovery led to a trial over validity, and their side convinced the judge to invalidate the agreement, resulting in a 50/50 split of the baseball team. “It wasn't a social media incident in its most popular sense, but it was an area where a document had far-reaching consequences,” Kump said.

The McCourt experience led him to examine future client communications closely, particularly with social media-savvy clients such as the Kardashians. Kump noted that he couldn't think of a single case that didn't have a chance to turn on an email. “There is something about the medium of emails where we say things we wouldn't normally say,” he explained. “Social media is then really just an extension of what has gone on in emails.”

But the difference, he added, is immediacy. “What's even more worrisome about social media is the obvious thing. If it's an email, at least until it's on a 10 foot screen [in court], it's between you and me. But for social media, it goes to a million people or more.”

This is a particularly hard lesson for celebrities. “Obviously a lot of what they do is based in the world of social media,” Kump explained. “Many of them have followers that are 80, 90, 100 million people, so anything that is sent is obviously subject to all sorts of issues.”

East Coast Celebrities

Though perhaps not with the glitz of Hollywood, Washington, D.C., has its own set of celebrities. Simpson joked, “Mike and I have something in common: I also work in Hollywood in a sense, but Hollywood for ugly people.”

The power of social media in Washington, though, is no laughing matter. Just ask former Reps. Anthony Weiner and Tim Murphy. “In those cases, the impact is on the member, his or her career, and their family,” Simpson explained. “But in some cases, it has an impact on government and on elections.”

To that end, he pointed to one of the highest-profile cases of his career: the 2006 Mark Foley case, where the former member of the House of Representatives had sent sexually explicit instant messages to teenage boys serving as congressional pages. He interviewed many congressional pages and uncovered a number of transgressions, but the smoking gun was electronic evidence: hundreds of pages of instant messages. Asked why he kept it, the page told Simpson, “I knew some day that I'd probably want to come back to Washington to work, and I thought it'd be useful to me.”

Reasons for keeping the documents notwithstanding, Simpson noted that Republicans had controlled the House leading into the 2006 midterm elections, and while they might have lost seats anyway, many felt that exacerbated losses. “The key was this kid who kept all these electronic records and supplied them to us.”