Facebook Spoliation Costs Lawyer $522,000; Ends His Legal Career

http://ow.ly/7vkLN

A blog post by John Patzakis on the eDiscovery Law & Tech blog.

This article discusses a case in which an attorney and his client were both sanctioned for removing Facebook posts. The article states, "n what many are calling the largest eDiscovery sanction penalty ever leveled directly against an attorney, a Virginia state judge ordered lawyer Matthew Murray to pay $522,000 for instructing his client to remove photos from his Facebook profile, and for his client to pay an additional $180,000 for obeying the instructions." A copy of the final order in Lester v. Allied Concrete Company is provided by a link within the article. 

According the blog post, the attorney in question has given up his legal practice subsequent to the incident involving the removed Facebook posts.

The article also discusses the current view of social media network evidence that many attorneys operate under, "This case reflects a trend we see based on anecdotal data points where a minority of legal and eDiscovery practitioners have not quite placed social media evidence on the same par as other electronic evidence. For instance, I believe it is highly unlikely that Murray would have instructed his client to delete all his emails or wipe his hard drive, but for some reason he differentiated social media evidence.

The attorneys we speak with are telling us that social media evidence is relevant to nearly every case they handle and the savvy ones are using social media evidence to win their cases."