Social Networking Sites and Insurance Litigation

Gary Zimmerman is a lawyer with the McLennan Ross law firm of Edmonton, Alberta. He discusses the effect of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et cetera have on the insurance industry when it comes to litigation. Gary Zimmerman: Generally, what it is, they call it user generated content, UGC. That content is actually mind blowing if you look at the statistics out there. It's social networking. It allows people to connect with each other of course, which is exactly what the word implies. But when people are connecting with each other, they're obviously posting information in somewhat of a public domain. And it's that information that they're posting that's often interesting to parties involved in litigation . . . all sorts of litigation. Not only insurance matters that relate to motor vehicle accidents where a plaintiff is putting their own health at issue, but all sorts of litigation. And what you'll be able to find is that the police have started using social networking web sites to track criminals that have evaded service for two or three years. Recently in Australia an order was granted allowing a party to be served legal documents through Facebook. Right now what you have, you've got a number of different social networking sites, but the dominant one at the moment is definitely Facebook. Facebook has 200 million active users, they boast. That makes them the fifth largest country in the world. It's actually pretty interesting. Other ones that are dominant players are of course Twitter, but MySpace is there, and YouTube. YouTube is truly amazing too because there's 150 thousand videos uploaded to YouTube daily. Now you can imagine if you're involved in personal injury litigation what that means because when someone makes a claim, they put their health at issue. You don't have much to question their claims because their claims are often subjective. I'm in pain. And so one of the ways we, as defense counsel, try to verify or refute their allegations, is by hiring private investigators, we get surveillance on people. And it's very common to do that. But that's governed by a whole bunch of factors, one of which is expense, another which is time, another of which is just being lucky to be in the right place at the right time. What we've found now is that with things like Facebook, people are their own private investigators. They might not anticipate . . . what happens is, they get caught up in the whole business of the fame, or whatever you want to call it, and they wind up posting photos of themselves, or status updates. I think Facebook suggests that 20 million users update their status once a day. And that can mean anything from, "Gary Zimmerman bench pressed 250 pounds today"—which you'll never see on my site—or "Gary ran a marathon", or whatever the case is. And those are important because if I'm defending an action, and the guy tells me he can't go over and tie his shoes, and at the ... continued here: http://www.ilstv.com/social-networkin...