October 22, 2011 - In handing down its decision yesterday in Wayne Crookes and West Coast Title Search Ltd. v. Jon Newton, the Supreme Court of Canada struck an important blow for certainty as far as Canadian internet publishers and users are concerned. The case, appealed from the British Columbia Court of Appeal, concerned a website operated by Newton. An article he posted on it contained hyperlinks to other websites, which in turn contained information about Crookes. Crookes sued Newton alleging that two of the hyperlinks connected to defamatory material, and that by using the hyperlinks, Newton was himself “publishing” the defamatory material. Read more...
First published on September 22, 2011 at e-Discovery Law Review Monetary sanctions, attorneys fees, and adverse inference jury instructions are the more common type of sanctions imposed on litigants for the spoliation of evidence, or not producing relevant documents. Recently, however, a court has increased the severity and impact of sanctions by applying them not only to current litigation, but also to a party’s future litigation, with the effects lingering for years to come.
The Underlying Suit
“Any competent electronic discovery effort would have located this email.” These words were written in an opinion by a United States District Judge in the Eastern District of Texas in Green v. Blitz U.S.A., Inc., No. 2:07-CV-372 (E.D. Tex., Mar. 1, 2011) Green involved a product liability suit in which the requirement of a flame arrester was in dispute. The jury returned a defense verdict, and the plaintiff collected a low settlement amount as part of a high-low settlement agreement. During discovery in a subsequent case with the same defendant and plaintiff’s counsel, counsel learned of documents that were not produced in Green. The plaintiff then filed a motion for sanctions against the defendant in Green and a motion to re-open the Green case. While the court denied the motion to re-open because the statute of limitations had expired, the court did impose sanctions for the discovery abuse.
The ABA has issued a formal ethics opinion that provides guidance to lawyers whose clients use an employer’s email account to send or receive email from counsel. In Formal Opinion 11-459, the Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility urges lawyers to warn their clients that the confidentiality of electronic communications may be jeopardized if the employer or other third party, such as a hotel or library, has the potential to access email or other correspondence hosted on the third party’s computer system.
When clients use an employer’s computer, smartphone or other telecommunications device, or an employer’s email account, the employer may be able to obtain access to the communications and take advantage of that opportunity in various contexts, such as when the client is engaged in an employment dispute or when the employer is responding to a subpoena or document discovery in litigation.
The Clerk for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania recently ruled that there is a heavy presumption that prevailing parties may recover certain e-discovery costs under 28 U.S.C. § 1920. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d)(1) allows prevailing parties to submit bills of costs for certain expenses, enumerated in 28 U.S.C. § 1920, for taxation by the Clerk against the non-prevailing parties. For example, that statute provides for the taxation of costs related to obtaining copies of transcripts and printing. More significantly, the statute provides for the taxation of “[f]ees for exemplification and the cost of making copies of any materials where the copies are necessarily obtained for use in the case.” 28 U.S.C. § 1920(4). While the term “exemplification” is undefined, federal district clerks have traditionally awarded, as exemplification and copying costs, those costs related to the production of paper documents, photographs, models, maps, blow-ups, charts, and diagrams.
A “trend” is generally defined as a general course, drift or prevailing tendency. In the battle between the potential privacy rights of a social networking site user and the desire of a lawsuit party to have full access to the private portions of that user’s profile, the trend favoring full and unfettered access has become clearer with a decision just issued by the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas in the case of McMillen v. Hummingbird Speedway, Inc.
In McMillen, the plaintiff was injured during a stock car race, and sued for damages after being rear-ended during a cooling down lap. He alleged significant physical injuries and overall loss of general health and vitality, as well as an “inability to enjoy certain pleasures of life.” During the lawsuit, the defendants requested that plaintiff identify the name of all sites to which he belonged, and to identify his user name(s), login name(s), and passwords. Plaintiff responded by stating that he belonged to Facebook and MySpace, but he refused to give the other requested information based on confidentiality and privacy grounds.
His name is Ghyslain Raza, but you may know of him as “Star Wars Kid”, a portly 15-year-old student at a Quebec private high school who had filmed himself wielding a mock light saber, pretending to be a Star Wars character in combat. The two-minute video was supposed to be private, but he left it lying around at his school where three students, who did not know the teenager, came across the video, posted it on the Internet on April 14, 2003, adding a message inviting people to make insulting remarks about the clip.
Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t just his friends who found the footage so amusing. The video went ‘viral’. One Web log that posted the video was allegedly downloaded 1.1 million times, and by October 2004 one Internet site dedicated to the video had recorded 76 million visits. According to UK marketing firm The Viral Factory, it became the most downloaded video of 2006. So mortified was the teenager that he dropped out of school and finished the semester at a psychiatric ward. According to the student, “It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class.” More than 35 other revised versions of the video clip, created by other people, have found their way to the Internet, with additional sound and visual effects.
This is an extreme but far from unique example of the devastation wrought by cyber-bullying, the term given to internet conduct in which students harass other students by e-mail and on the internet. Given the potentially devastating consequences of cyberbullying, should schools have the power to discipline their students engaging in this form of harmful conduct?
A major issue confronting school boardsis that cyberbullying usually does not take place at school, although its effects can later reverberate among students during school hours. Students may post offensive material from home, or other times outside of school hours, but the targets are fellow classmates. Is it appropriate for a school board to discipline a student for posting such material simply because the postings are being accessed by other students at school or target other students? At the same time, with power comes responsibility – if school boards have the power to discipline students for their behavior outside of school, are schools then to be mandated with the responsibility to essentially monitor and censor the world-wide web? Just how far should a school board’s jurisdiction extend regarding inappropriate off-school student e-conduct?
Posted February 22nd, 2010 by Narine BagdassariancloseAuthor: Narine BagdassarianName: Narine Bagdassarian Email: nbagdass@yahoo.com Site:http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/narine-bagdassarian/19/855/ba3 About: Narine Bagdassarian is a lawyer with Jones Harley LLP in Toronto, Ontario. Her experience focuses on insurance defense work - personal injury, property loss, products liability and subrogation. Before moving to Toronto, she was a practicing attorney in Los Angeles, specializing in Workers’ Compensation Insurance Defense. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from UCLA in 2002 and, in 2005, she obtained her law degree from Whittier Law School.
Narine is a huge UCLA Bruins football fan, as well as being a devoted Los Angeles Kings fan. (Pre-game superstitions and protocol? Check.) She looks forward to the day when she can own the Kings. In the meantime, she's attempting to resist the urge to speak like a Canadian (failing miserably at this, she's been told).See Authors Posts (5)
Who would have thought a comment as innocent as “Just walked into work at Cozen O’Connor-Toronto…so much work to get done” could potentially cause you so much trouble?
I came across an article this weekend by Tracy Staedter, titled “I’m Not Home: Please Rob Me”. Ready to become paranoid? Read the article – it’s short and to the point. Ever send out Evites? How about prior tweets, MySpace posts, etc. inviting people to your place and including an address? Bingo! Better pack up and move quick!
The website causing havoc is www.PleaseRobMe.com. Check it out…make sure you aren’t on the site…then check again after every time you tweet, post, etc. Do you have the time to constantly check? Probably not. Should you? Probably. It may make you paranoid, but then again, shouldn’t you be? But should the creators of the website be blamed – legally, morally, ethically? Should they be held accountable for what you put out into the public realm? Can you sue for violation of your privacy rights? Do you really have an expectation of privacy in any of those posts? In an age where MySpace, Friendster and other social networking sites regularly have their records subpoenaed, why should anyone think that anything they post will be “private”? What piqued my curiosity even more was how this website could apply in the criminal or tort law application. Can this website be used to substantiate or corroborate an accused’s alibi – “Your Honor, look! I have proof that I wasn’t in the city when the crime occurred…I tweeted that I would be in Los Angeles!” Look, my knowledge of Canadian (or U.S., for that matter) Criminal Law/Procedure does not extend further than the 800 or so pages of textbooks I read while in law school. But surely this website can be put to more use than just what the creators intended. So long as a proper foundation is laid, and the purported evidence is relevant, it may be admitted, right? Something to definitely consider as a defense attorney.
The creators of the website claim the site is supposed to help us…to open our eyes to the evil out in the world. Call me crazy, but perhaps a simple email addressed to me would have been more appreciated…though it leaves one wondering if such a logical course of action would have been as effective.
A married woman in Nevada sued her employer, claiming that he sent her inappropriate emails and gave her unwanted sexual attention. During the lawsuit, the employer’s lawyer discovered that the woman had set up a MySpace account where she pretended to be single. The employer’s lawyer wanted to see her MySpace emails; if this woman was looking for extra-marital affairs on MySpace, this might speak to her credibility. The judge refused.
In a decision of the Nevada District Court, Mackelprang v. Fidelity National Title Agency of Nevada Inc, a married plaintiff alleged that she was sexually harassed by senior members of her company, and that this led to her constructive dismissal. She alleged, among other things, that a vice president of her company sent sexually explicit emails to her office computer a weekly basis. During the course of litigation, the defendant’s lawyer discovered that, a few months after leaving the defendant’s employ, the plaintiff had opened two MySpace accounts; in one of the accounts, the plaintiff identified herself as a single 39 year old female who did not want children, and in another account, she identified herself as a married woman with six children whom she loved.
The defendant’s lawyer obtained a subpoena directing MySpace to produce all records for those accounts, including private email exchanges between the plaintiff and others. In response to the subpoena, MySpace produced the “public” information regarding the accounts, but refused to produce private email messages in the absence of a search warrant or a letter of consent to production by the owner of the account. The plaintiff refused to consent to the obtaining of the release of the private messages on the grounds that the information sought by the defendants were irrelevant to the lawsuit and improperly invaded her privacy. She contended that the defendants were on a “fishing expedition” and that they had no relevant basis for discovering the private email messages on either account.
The defendant’s lawyer brought a motion seeking to compel the plaintiff to consent to production of the emails. The defendant’s pointed to the usual circumstances of the plaintiff’s two MySpace accounts as creating an inference that the plaintiff was using MySpace email to facilitate the same types of electronic and physical relationships that she had characterized as sexual harassment in her lawsuit. If the plaintiff had, in fact, been voluntarily pursuing extra-marital relationships through MySpace, then this information could be used to impeach her credibility and rebut her sexual harassment claims. The emails could telling as to whether the plaintiff had actually suffered emotional distress as a result of the harassment, and might contain admissions relevant to the case.
The Court disagreed with the defendant and refused to order production of the emails. The defendant had nothing more than a suspicion and speculation that the plaintiff may have engaged in sexually related email communications on MySpace. There was an insufficient connection between the accounts and the workplace to make her private emails relevant. The Court noted:
Ordering plaintiff to execute the consent and authorization form for release of all of the private email on Plaintiff’s MySpace.com internet accounts would allow Defendants to cast too wide a net for any information that might be relevant and discoverable. It would, of course, permit Defendants to also obtain irrelevant information, including possibly sexually explicit or sexually promiscuous email communications between Plaintiff and third persons, which are not relevant, admissible or discoverable.
The Nevada District Court opined that, although it was theoretically possible that emails on the Myspace account might contain relevant information, the defendant should have limited the request to the production of relevant email communications. The determination of whether certain email communications were relevant could be properly ascertained through the discovery process.
No Canadian case to date has considered a request for the production of Myspace or Facebook emails. It seems likely that Courts will treat these emails differently than the other information on a social network profile; even a “private” Myspace profile is viewable by all a user’s “friends” whereas email is not; consequently, a Court may not be able to infer from the nature of the social network service either the intent to make public, or the likely existence of, relevant email communication. As a result, courts will likely hold that there is a greater expectation of privacy with respect to Myspace or Facebook email communications. It also remains to been seen whether evidence contained in a profile itself could give rise to a sufficiently reasonable inference that that email communications are relevant. For example, if relevant postings on a Facebook wall made express reference to email communications, this might be sufficient to convince a Canadian court to order disclosure, notwithstanding the expectation of privacy surrounding such communications.
Monetary sanctions, attorneys fees, and adverse inference jury instructions are the more common type of sanctions imposed on litigants for the spoliation of evidence, or not producing relevant documents. Recently, however, a court has increased the severity and impact of sanctions by applying them not only to current litigation, but also to a party’s future litigation, with the effects lingering for years to come.
