News & EVENTS
Webinar:
Social Media: A Brief Overview of FINRA and a Practical Guide to Identifying and Gathering Social Media Evidence
To address best practices for online interactions, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) recently released guidelines for the use of social media. The guidelines consider a broker's interaction in an online chat room as subject to the same restrictions as an in-person presentation to investors. These restrictions require its member institutions to preserve e-mails; forbids indiscriminate recommendation of investment products; and sets guidelines on how brokers and dealers can be seen to endorse securities. This webinar covers FINRA guidelines as they relate to the use of social media including:
- How brokerage firms are managing requests from their registered representatives to enable customer communication through social media
- Proactive guidelines set forth by FINRA regarding the supervision and record keeping requirements that apply to social media communications
- Why "static" portions of a registered representative's page should be approved by a firm's registered principal
- How and why firms should supervise the "interactive" portion of the page
Social media based evidence grows in a random and chaotic fashion that challenges most litigators' traditional methods of discovery. As it's not practical for outside counsel to monitor opposing parties' social media based electronic evidence and the general public has proven to be careless in their social media communication, it behooves counsel to develop methodologies that can monitor such potentially key evidence sources. This webinar also discusses;
- How parties to litigation oftentimes post harmful, potentially damaging evidence to social media sites
- How difficult it is to achieve privacy on social media sites
- Why litigators should not ignore such potentially rich sources of evidence.
[ To view this webinar, please download the free Flash Player. ]