Social Media Surveillance Services
Social Media Surveillance Services include the monitoring of web sites related to the issues and target individuals associated with a particular matter. Without the knowledge of the target individual, this web-based electronically stored information (WESI) such as blogs and social media postings, are collected, preserved, and securely made available for analysis by the client.
The Situation
With the rise of electronic discovery, dispute resolution has become a growing burden to corporations. Many companies report that electronic discovery costs can eat up a majority of a given case’s total litigation budget. Plus, with the significant rise in the use of social media based websites, the ability to ensure that all relevant sources of electronic evidence are identified has become even
more difficult and expensive.
Corporations, law firms, and individual practicing attorneys are often engaged in matters that require confidential and constant monitoring, collection, and preservation of social media web sites relative to issues and individuals associated with a specific matter. Web-based evidence through these sources usually occurs randomly and is often short-lived, as potentially damaging evidence is often taken down before it is noticed or collected.
Constant monitoring of an infinite number of possible websites is difficult, time consuming, and extremely difficult to accomplish.
The Solution
Scarab Consulting now offers Social Media Surveillance Services, a unique solution which combines technology innovation with extensive electronic discovery experience to help ensure that all potentially relevant sources of ESI, including all WESI, are identified, gathered, and available for analysis. Using this solution, WESI is surreptitiously monitored and collected relative to a target individual’s activities, blogs, and other publicly available web based information up to and including during the related trial.
The electronic evidence gathered using this service is hosted at Scarab’s safe harbor certified facilities and clients are given password access to their collected evidence via a secure internet portal site.
Key Features
- 24x7 surveillance of known critical websites
- Automatic identification and surveillance of any new relevant websites
- Criminal standard collection of ESI from websites
- Each monitoring instance multiplies human proficiency
- Automated segregation of collected ESI by subject matter such as;
- Labor and employment
- Intellectual Property
Web Monitoring for Civil Litigation
Plaintiffs in civil lawsuits can often be particularly careless when posting to social media sites such as blogs, Facebook, and MySpace. Information often posted to these sites that may be relevant to a lawsuit could include the location of a plaintiff, social activities including alcohol consumption, disclosure of confidential employer owned trade secrets, or other such breaches of a defendant company’s employee handbook.
Traditionally, this key information that could otherwise be extremely useful in a lawsuit has been difficult to identify and collect. The primary challenge posed by web based evidence through these sources is that it usually occurs randomly and is often short-lived, as potentially damaging posts can be taken down before they are noticed or collected by the defendant. Because of this, it has not made fiscal sense nor been effective to have an investigator spend significant time monitoring the many possible locations or combing the web for potential evidence.
Following are sample cases where Scarab’s Social Media Surveillance Services could be useful.
- Monitor a plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit who should be home convalescing but is found to be posting beach vacation pictures to their social web MySpace account.
- Discover a party consuming alcohol in a medical class action lawsuit wherein the party swore under oath they did not imbibe.
- Monitor defendant in a theft of trade secrets case to identify misappropriated information being posted to the web.
- Monitor the web for evidence that could be used to impeach a witness under oath.
Additional Services
- Add traditional electronically stored information (ESI) such as email and loose files to the Social Media Surveillance data for analysis and review.
- Export tagged documents (WESI and ESI) to review tools such as Relativity.