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Investigations Using Social Media: How to Do It; How Not to Do It

May 2, Feb 5, 2013 at 1:30 pm ET

Duration: 90 minutes

Speaker: Benjamin Wright

 

• Last year, courts in Connecticut and Maryland tossed out key evidence, derived from social networks, because authenticity could not be sufficiently confirmed.
• A few months ago, a Virginia court fined a lawyer $522,000, and his client $180,000, for removing unflattering photos from the client's Facebook page right before trial.
• From January 2010 through October 2011, American courts published an astonishing 674 decisions that made substantial reference to evidence obtained from social media sites. And published decisions represent just a fraction of actual lawsuits.

For official investigations, social media like Facebook® and Twitter® are veritable gushers of evidence. Today, HR disputes, divorces, tax audits, civil lawsuits, criminal probes, internal corporate investigations, regulatory inquiries, child custody battles and virtually all other kinds of investigations are uncovering relevant evidence from social networks. For instance, employees often defame or embarrass their employers on social media. What can you do to find the evidence and use it to discipline the employee?

 

But the networks are so new that few if any standard practices exist for finding, gathering and preserving evidence. The environment is daunting. New social media sites pop up like mushrooms. What's more, all of them change constantly, as they compete with new features, interconnections, privacy policies and legal terms of service.

 

In 2012, a professional investigator – an auditor, a lawyer, an HR manager, a police detective or a private investigator – would be negligent not to consider social media evidence. This webinar will analyze different methods for accessing and recording the evidence. It will evaluate pitfalls, including privacy and ethical issues the investigator must bear in mind. It will offer practical tips for establishing that an investigation is lawful and responsible and yields credible evidence.

 

Areas covered in the webinar

• What are the relevant social networks, and what can be found in them?
• Diverse examples where social media evidence has been relevant in legal cases and other investigations
• What risks does an investigator face when probing social media?
• Ethical limits on the scope and methods of investigation
• Techniques for managing risk and staying within the law and ethics
• How to get access to evidence that is not readily available
• Assessment of different techniques for preserving and authenticating evidence from social networks
• How to prepare an investigative report that will be acceptable and believable, in court, two or three years later
• General principles to make you more intuitive about what is allowed and not allowed in this emerging field of e-discovery

 

 

Logistics

• 90-minute webinar (Travel-Free) delivered over the phone and Internet.
• Unlimited listeners per connection - bring the entire department.
• Q&A session with the expert.

This event will be presented live by phone together with a PowerPoint presentation to be viewed on your computer. Internet access is not required for phone-only participants. The PowerPoint slides will be provided shortly before the event. Once you register, you will receive an email which is your receipt and which includes your instructions for dialing in and logging on. You will also receive an email reminder 24 hours before the webinar.