Yes. When you are involved in a lawsuit, especially if you are a named party, there is a very good likelihood that your personal information will be exposed: to your attorney, to opposing counsel, to your adversary, and to the Court.
Part of the evidence-gathering process involved in a lawsuit, labeled as the ‘discovery’ process, involves identifying as much information as possible on the parties involved in the suit – this can mean diving deep into a party’s personal information. Lawyers are tasked with finding facts to support their client’s position and social media is fair game in the fact-finding arena. Meaning, if you are a plaintiff in a person injury suit, or any type of lawsuit for that matter, the other side will likely review your public social media profiles and any other publicly available information to bolster their case against you.
To say the least, it is not wise to post a picture of you skiing in the Alps when seeking damages for injuries sustained in a car accident. Similarly, it would not be wise to post pictures of you taking a months-long vacation while suing your former employer in an employment discrimination case.
Your allegations, demanded damages, and claims could be discredited and invalidated in a deposition, or in trial, if the other side finds these posts and uses them to show your failure to mitigate your damages or to attack the credibility of your alleged injury.
This was illustrated in the recent trial involving Gwyneth Paltrow in which she was sued for a skiing crash involving the Plaintiff. The Plaintiff claimed that his life was substantially affected from the injuries he sustained from Paltrow’s supposed negligent skiing, but this theory was quickly weakened when Paltrow’s attorneys questioned him about his trips taken all over the world since he sustained the claimed injuries. However, herein lies the tricky part; if you find yourself scratching your head and now want to check out your social media pages and are a current party in a suit, deleting or destroying pictures or posts you have already posted could make it seem like you are hiding something, or even worse constitute the spoliation of evidence.
The bottom line is this: be truthful, don’t tamper with evidence, and only file a lawsuit if you are ready to bare it all. You won’t have anything to hide if you have nothing to hide.
