Social Media: the Next eDiscovery Elephant in the Corner – Electronic Discovery

http://ow.ly/6DDRc

An article from electronicdiscoveryinfo.com written by jcscholtes.

This article discusses the increased importance of social media to eDiscovery processes.  More social media electronically stored information is being requested in litigation, and eDiscovery services will have an increased need to be able to process such data.

As the article states, " In a recent survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) 41% of the questioned legal professionals indicated that identifying and collecting from new data sources as SharePoint and the cloud is challenging. In short, social media composes new challenges for both IT and legal departments."

The article also mentions that Gartner estimates that social media will be subject to eDiscovery requests for 1/2 of existing corporations by the close of 2013.

Some of the startling numbers provided by the article are as follows:

• In 2009 already two-thirds of the world’s internet population visited social networking or blogging sites
• Social media accounts for one in every six minutes spent online
• Last year Americans spend a third of their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging, and that number is rapidly growing
• In February 2011 the average number of Tweets people sent per day, was 140 million. On March 11 of that same year it was 170 million and the number is still growing
• Facebook has more than 750 million active users. 50% of their active users log on to Facebook every day
• The US houses 114.55 million, the Netherlands 6.30 million, Germany 18.81 million and the UK 19.27 million active social networkers 
• “750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over New Year’s weekend 2011”

The article also references some laws that impact the use of social media, "As an employer there are some laws you need to consider, especially when using social networks in the recruitment process.

• The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has not issued specific guidance on the use of online profiles to inform recruitment decisions. There are recommendations like “give the applicant an opportunity to make representations should any of the checks produce discrepancies” .
• Data Protection Act (DPA): in the US, some states have laws protecting employees’ legal off-duty activities and political activities or affiliations.
• Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act protects employees who engage in “concerted activities” that includes the right to discuss the terms and conditions of employment with colleagues and outsiders. 
• Federal and state whistleblower laws protect employees who complain about misconduct and potential securities fraud violations."

As the author states, "It is clear that data in social networks are the next elephant in the corner. After having dealt with exponential data volumes, email and multimedia in the past years, there is a new dimension to records management and eDiscovery: not only do we have even more data than ever, we also no longer have control over that data within our secure corporate networks: it is now in the cloud, which basically that means it is everywhere and nowhere and we no longer own the data! Implementing eDiscovery and records management will be an even bigger challenge!"

P.S. You can read Joe's article on this topic, it provides a link at the end of the article to a social media database that shows over 230 corporations social media use policies: http://www.litigationsupporttechnologyandnews.com/2011/09/social-media-in-workplace-regulating.html