Our laws have not kept up with technology. Social media like Twitter (with users posting “tweets” for others to read) and Facebook are having a big impact on life, and the impact on the legal system is yet to be determined. The one thing I’ve observed related to the legal system and social media is that lawyers usually overreact about these things.<\/p>\n
Take the recent situation with a juror tweeting. Attorney Anne Reed at Deliberations has an excellent summary of the situation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here’s what happened… A juror named Johnathan used twitter before and after a trial. He didn’t tweet during the trial, just before and after. The jury he was on awarded $12.6 million to the plaintiffs in the trial, but the corporation on the hook for the $12.6 million says they should get a new trial because of the tweets.<\/p>\n What did he tweet?<\/p>\n Now remember that none of these occurred during<\/strong> the trial. He made innocent comments about jury duty before he started his trial, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. The tweets about the verdict and the company were done after<\/strong> the trial was over. Again, no harm. Jurors aren’t prohibited from talking about a trial after it’s over, and “talking” via Twitter should be no different.<\/p>\n Anne offers the most common sense approach to the use of social media by jurors: “If the juror had done the same thing off line, what would we do?”<\/em><\/p>\n It’s a simple solution, and it works. Here are her examples of how this wold work:<\/p>\n\n
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