Let's face it: More than a quarter of the world's population is online, accessing and sharing information on a 24/7 basis. Therefore, for lawyers and other legal researchers, the Internet has become a NBF ["new best friend]" and is a logical first choice for researching people -- finding them and gathering background information. [By the way, I tell all of my clients either to take down their Facebook or MySpace websites or make them accessible only to trusted insiders.]
Family lawyers find gold in those sites. Family lawyers aren’t the only ones who can use information from the Internet. Imagine the insurance company lawyers searching them, too, only to see that the lady who claimed she was terribly injured in an auto accident has posted photos of herself and a friend square-dancing up a storm last week!]
Carole A. Levitt, California lawyer, Internet researcher and trainer, and author with Mark E. Rosch, of Find Info Like A Pro, [published by the ABA an updated reference guide to their last book, The Lawyer's Guide to Fact Finding on the Internet share secrets of Internet search: Insider tips, little-known resources, backgrounding experts and more.
Levitt and Rosch are Internet experts and can offer trial lawyers--family law lawyers and others--many practical tips about how to gather reliable and useful information.
The ABA e-newsletter "Your ABA" published an article about Internet researching today: Secrets of Internet search: Insider tips, little-known resources, backgrounding experts, more.
Levitt talks about researching social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook:
We added a 40-page chapter on social networking in this book – specifically dealing with the kinds of research issues you raise, and more. I think it’s the first thing that lawyers should know—how MySpace and Facebook work. We suggest that lawyers research not only the opposing party, but their own clients, opposing lawyers, jurors.
We also suggest that lawyers take a course or at least think very hard about the ethics of using what they find on social networking sites, and the ethics of their own use of their own social networking profiles. Lawyers have to be very careful about what they say in their own social networking profiles.
We give several examples in the book about social networking profiles of attorneys coming back to hurt them from an ethical standpoint. We give many anecdotes—war stories—about how lawyers have used social networking to help their cases, and how they have been hurt.
Levitt also discussing how to determine whether the website they're looking at is credible.
Lawyers need to make sure the website they’re looking at is credible, and they need to do a little assessment. Lawyers need to figure out who has created the website: Is it a government website? Is it an educational website? Or is it just Joe’s idea of what the law should be?
Actually, I used the Internet almost exclusively to do complex medical research while writing my book Taking Charge: Good Medical Care for the Elderly and How to Get It. Determining the reliability of a website was essential because I was looking for credible medical information that family caregivers could rely upon. I'll write another blog article soon about how to assess a website's credibility.
You may read the article Secrets of Internet search: Insider tips, little-known resources, backgrounding experts, more on the ABA e-newsletter here. Thanks to Paula Aylward, family lawyer in Marshall, Michigan for this tip.
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