Social Media Evidence in Civil Cases

In this article we’re going to briefly talk about how we help attorneys with social media evidence in civil cases.

In our 7 years of doing this, we’ve come across some findings that illustrate the need for attorneys to look at social media.

Social media evidence about your client

With one of our long time clients, they engage with us to see if their client is doing anything that is counter to their claim. This gives them a strategic edge when it comes to anticipating what the opposing party may bring up. It allows our client to get to the root of the issue with their client to help decide what the best path forward is. Let’s say it’s a personal injury case and a neighbor takes video of your client’s client raking leaves in the yard. That neighbor then publishes it to a social media platform. Your client’s client may be medically cleared by their doctor to do certain physical tasks, but as part of their orders, if they experience any pain while working, they have to go in and rest and/or take medication. This is why it’s advantageous to have us look for this kind of content.

Fake account social media evidence

Like the section above, one thing we do is verify the authenticity of a social media profile. Sometimes it’s incredibly simple as all the artifacts we look for are there. Sometimes it’s difficult, or impossible, and this is especially true with fake social media profiles. One of the cases we helped out with involved a network of fake profiles. Even though our client knew they were fake, our objective was to see if we could unmask who was behind these accounts.

Online defamation and harassment

One of our more consequential cases we worked on involved a very heated public argument on social media. We were engaged to only preserve these posts.

By preserving evidence on social media platforms, you are safeguarding from an outage on these sites, broken images, or the complete shuttering of the company. By having the evidence preserved, you can still examine it regardless of the state of the source site.

By having social media posts properly preserved, you can show there was spoliation of evidence. If the opposing party is frantically trying to “delete,” or alter, their social media posts, and evidence was collected in time, you can compare what you have verses what is on their profile which is impactful to show in court.

Reach out

If you’re an attorney looking to use social media evidence in one of your cases, let’s talk. Fill out the contact form below. And while you’re here, sign up for our cybersecurity and research newsletter.