Social media, like e-mail, has gained traction. In order to avoid the mistakes made in the email generation, companies must figure out ways on how to best collect and preserve social media content in the event it is needed for eDiscovery. Today, this practice is extremely immature. Across the board, 15% or less of eDJ’s The Cloud and eDiscovery survey respondents indicated having had to collect from a popular social media service.
Just because Social Media is not the dominant source of eDiscovery today does not mean that companies should not address it as part of a holistic eDiscovery strategy.
The legal community typically waits for case law to establish the rules of the game. There may not be an overwhelming amount of case law pertaining to Social Media, but one important case to note is “IN RE NTL, INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION; GORDON PARTNERS, et al., Plaintiffs, -against- GEORGE S. BLUMENTHAL, et al., Defendants.” Essentially, companies are on the hook for eDiscovery of social media. Per the case, if a company has “access to documents to conduct business, it has possession, custody or control of documents for the purposes of discovery.”[1]
