Tips and Techniques for a Defensible Social Media Discovery Process

Tweets, status updates, wall posts, messages… these have all become forms of business communication. The acceleration of social media has created yet another e-discovery headache for litigators.  The problem is growing, and social media must be considered when preparing a case. It is almost required now that attorneys be knowledgeable and due diligence around social media. When comparing social media discovery to traditional discovery the process is essentially the same; search, identify, preserve, analyze and produce. But social media discovery requires specific techniques and a lot more “digging” than traditional discovery.

In a recent Digital Reef/ Masters Conference webinar, attorneys and experts gave best practice tips and techniques for doing social media discovery. The webinar provided available research tools and checklists for doing social media research, and gathering evidence. Sites like peekyou.com, people.yahoo.com, google.com/cse, to name a few, are sites that can be used as research tools to build a discovery profile using everything available through a public domain.

The panel stressed the need to document everything, and advised the audience “if your methodologies for retrieving evidence can be replicated, than you can be confident that you have carried out a reasonable and defensible means for gathering evidence”.

Find out how you can do social media discovery, what precautions you should take, and get access to research tools and checklists by viewing the webinar. The webinar recording is now available and can be accessed here.