An interesting article was just published about the crossroads of social networking and worker’s compensation law. Social networking and social digital communication in general is somewhat new to case law, so the examples and guidance in this article are very enlightening.
Here’s one example from the article:
In EEOC v. Simply Storage Management, LLC, an employment law case, a magistrate judge ordered employees to produce social networking profile information from their Facebook and MySpace accounts in response to a discovery request. The EEOC filed a sexual harassment complaint on behalf of two employees against their supervisor. It requested a discovery conference because counsel disagreed about the proper scope of discovery involving social networking documents, including items from Facebook and MySpace. The EEOC objected to the demand for the production of all documents related to the plaintiffs‘ social networking accounts and to deposition testimony about the employees‘ social networking profiles on the grounds that the requests were overbroad, not relevant, unduly burdensome, harassing, and embarrassing toward the employees. Magistrate Judge Debra Lynch found that the standard for discovery‘s scope is broad, and noted that where relevance is in doubt, the court should be permissive.
However, she also emphasized that the scope of discovery is not limitless. The EEOC argued that discovery of Facebook and MySpace profiles should be limited to information that directly relates to issues raised in the complaint.47 Ultimately, Magistrate Judge Lynch found all social networking content revealing, relating, or simply referring to allegations raised in the complaint to be discoverable. Judge Lynch also found that the fact that a user‘s profile is private and not available to the public does not shield information in that user‘s profile from discovery.
You can download this article here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1675026
photo credit: *Grant*
