Weblogging - A Lawyer's Nightmare

I spent all day yesterday being deposed in a ridiculous case where the company that bought one of our companies years ago subsequently went bankrupt and is now suing us because they claim that our company sunk theirs. Trust me, they sunk their own company. Ours had very little to do with the mess they created.

But that's not what i am blogging about tonight. My lawyer and i spent half the day on friday going through all the emails i ever sent or recieved about this company. Emails are the nightmare of the moment for lawyers. They rue the day that email was invented. Because all of a sudden, everything is in writing. It can be retrieved, read, analyzed, taken out of context, etc. Microsoft was the poster boy of this phenomenon.

But now we've got blogging.

And so, about three hours into my seven hours of hell, the lawyer on the other side, who is grilling me non-stop, says "... Mr. Wilson, in your weblog, it says ...". My lawyer looks at me with this panicked face that says "what the f..ck are weblogs"?

Turns out it was no big deal. Fortunately, there wasn't anything on this blog that could hurt me or our case.

But it made me think, when will we have our first case impacted by the truth told in weblogs?

Comments

[E.V.]

Don't worry about it too much. Depositions are fishing expeditions and it's a long way to go from a deposition transcript to admissibility in court. If your opponent is desperate enough to attempt to use something you've said in your blog as evidence, then they don't have much evidence and not much of a case. What depositions also try to do is to trap you into saying something that you contradict in other places (like a blog). That evidence may be admissible solely to challenge your reliability as a witness.

[Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH]

Yes, don't worry about it in this instance . . . but, at least you know you have at least one loyal reader, your opponent's lawyer. :-) It is an interesting question, and one that will likely be answered with a sooner, rather than a later . . . particularly given the number of companies which now regulate content their employees may put in their blogs or educational institutional systems which do the same, jeopardizing jobs based upon the moral imperpetude implied in glog entries. Of course, your original question "But it made me think, when will we have our first case impacted by the truth told in weblogs?" can also be extended to "or the half-truths implied or told in blogs as truth" given that many folks are living a fantasy life through their blogs, inflating what actually occurs or merely choosing which details to divulge in what way for narrative emphasis.

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