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Court Papers Served by Facebook
Imagine opening your inbox on a social networking site and finding an invitation -- not to connect to an acquaintance -- but to show up in court. That may be the direction that social networking is headed, at least in the aftermath of a case out of Australia, where a judge granted lawyers permission to serve defendants with a default judgment via Facebook.
According to Computer Weekly, a judge in Australia's supreme court allowed lawyers from the Canberra-based firm Meyer Vandenberg to serve the papers via the site, after being satisfied that the profiles the lawyers had found did in fact belong to the defendants in question. The lawyers were unable to find the defendants to allow for personal service, but the defendants' Facebook profiles contained enough information to satisfy the court that it would provide a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants.
This is yet another reason for why lawyers need to understand social networking sites: Even if they don't help with finding clients, as this story shows, they can play an important part in finding defendants.
Posted by Carolyn Elefant on December 16, 2008 at 05:20 PM | Permalink
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