E-Discovery and Social Networking

Here we have the inevitable collision of two massive movements.

The first is e-discovery, which over the last decade has moved from a subset of discovery to its own umbrella, covering email, IM chats, databases, CAD files, web sites, and any other electronically-stored information that could be relevant evidence in a law suit.

The second is social networking. Facebook, twitter, and myspace may be the best known, but there are also LinkedIn, Xanga, Badoo, Migente, Orkut, Studivz, Bebo, and hundreds if not thousands of more niche specific networks.

The wrinkle with social networking networking sites as they pertain to e-discovery is that they are very transient; pertinent information may only be online for days at a time.

Last week TechnoLawyer featured a product called Cloud Preservation, which is an online e-discovery service that archives and preserves content from Web sites, blogs, and social media.

According to TechnoLawyer:

"The people who work at your company (your clients for those of you who serve as outside counsel) continually add to, delete from, update, and refine your corporate Web sites, blogs, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and more. Nextpoint designed Cloud Preservation to automatically crawl these online properties at predefined intervals, creating a comprehensive and searchable archive of this content, including HTML source code and images."

While it obviously doesn't archive retroactively (although webarchive.org is an interesting source for websites pre-2009), anyone with a hint of advance notice can specify sites to monitor, thus precluding any possible spoliation.

Also, from the Cloud Preservation site comes the cryptic offer of a preferred customer program for "Corporations, consultants, law firms, and any organization interested in volume pricing with fewer restrictions."