How Facebook Can Hurt Your Employment Case

Having attended a few seminars largely geared toward attorneys who represent employers in discrimination and wrongful termination lawsuits, I keep hearing about the same strategy that so many of these lawyers love to use - finding "dirt" on Plaintiff on the social networking sites such as Facebook that can cast negative light on them, their personality and their allegations in the lawsuit. This can range from posting like "I will do anything to get back at my employer", to uploaded photos from exotic vacations that can hardly support emotional distress claim or financial hardship that are often important elements of a case. I personally know of one case, in which the aggrieved employee, who claimed major disability discrimination, posted photos of his hiking and rock-climbing trip about two months before trial. Imagine his and his lawyer's face when the defense attorney put up those photos on the overhead after getting the Plaintiff to testify on the record about the tremendous pain he has been in for the past 2 years. Needless to say that from that point on, the jury had a hard time believing anything that plaintiff was saying. 

You might be thinking: "But... I have privacy settings that would prevent anyone except my friends to see my photos." These privacy measures are not nearly as effective for several reasons. First, you might actually be a friend of a friend of defense counsel. If you have used Facebook, twitter and other networking sites long enough, you know that the world is actually that small. Secondly, the opposing counsel can try to "befriend" one of your friends in order to get access to your information. Many people confirm random friend requests just to be nice, so one of your friends might fall into that trap. Lastly, the courts approved subpoenas for social networking activity in the past, if it was relevant to the subject litigation. 

So, if you are involved in litigation, make sure you "clean up" your online social networking life before your attorney files a lawsuit and the other sides starts searching for information about you on the internet, because be assured - they will.