Social Media Evidence Spoliation and Preservation

No case better illustrates the risks of social media spoliation than Lester v. Allied Concrete Company. The plaintiff had lost his wife in a tragic vehicle accident and was suing for wrongful death. Unfortunately, some Facebook photos came to light that his lawyer was afraid would prejudice the case, and he consequently told his client to delete them. “We do not want blow ups of other pics at trial,” an email from the law firm read, “so please, please clean up your Facebook and MySpace!”

If you deal with digital information at all, you’ve undoubtedly heard of metadata. But do you know exactly what it is? And do you understand the importance of it as it relates to litigation? To help unpack this often confusing term, we’ve put together the following metadata explanation for your review.

There are many reasons why an organization might want to archive a website. For example, it might be a public sector or financial services entity that’s legally obligated to keep accurate records of all website data. Or the organization could be aiming to better protect itself against false claims and intellectual property theft of website content. Or perhaps a completely new website is being launched and the old one has to be archived to ensure the long-term preservation of what amounts to an important historical document for the organization.

If you’re even tangentially involved in the eDiscovery process, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). But what exactly is it?

There are a lot of benefits to implementing a team collaboration tool like Workplace from Meta. As I’ve written before, an enterprise social network can improve communication, streamline collaboration, and even improve and strengthen the culture of your organization.

When the EDRM community of eDiscovery and legal professionals first released the E-Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) in 2006, it highlighted “Records Management” as an integral component of the eDiscovery process. Today, the EDRM focuses on “Information Governance”, as opposed to records management. Moreover, the EDRM has even been supplemented with the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM), which offers an outline for how organizations should go about managing information related to potential litigation.

As I’ve written before, team collaboration tools—also called enterprise collaboration software or enterprise social networking—offer incredible benefits. For evidence of this, you need only look at a recent Forrester study that found Workplace from Meta to offer an ROI of 400%. According to the study, an investment of $2.6 million could provide quantified benefits over three years of $13.1 million. And companies could start seeing this substantial return on investment in as little as three months.

In 2005, attorney George Socha and technology expert Tom Gelbmann founded the EDRM community of eDiscovery and legal professionals. The aim of this new group was to improve standards in the eDiscovery industry and lay down specific guidelines—and one of the first results was the now-iconic E-Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) diagram.

Communication is key to business. For evidence of this, just consider the fact that we send 125 billion business emails every day. It’s also the reason why enterprise social networks and work collaboration tools have become so popular. These tools streamline communication, which has a direct impact on productivity. A study of Workplace by Facebook conducted by Forrester Consulting has shown that the platform can increase task efficiency, decision-making, innovation, and onboarding enough to offer an ROI of 400%.

Information Governance is more important than ever because the majority of large enterprises have a data problem. While just about every large company claims to be “data-driven” and focused on leveraging new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the evidence suggests that few are backing up this talk with real action. In fact, it can be argued that data is actually more of a liability than an asset in many organizations.