Canadian Lawyer

54 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m C hances are good that you don't know a single soul who doesn't have a social media account. Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and other social media networks boast millions of daily users, with Facebook alone having a reported 2.2 billion active monthly users earlier this year, many of whom share a stream of details about their families, vacations and everyday lives. These details can be goldmines for litigators. With technological advances and an increased use of social and digital media as evidence in cases, litigators today may have significant social media evidence on which to draw, but they must also be aware of their own clients' use of it. Indeed, using social media and electronic documents as evidence is becom- ing so commonplace in litigation that "if your firm is not doing it, you should be asking, 'Why aren't we?' It should be part of everyone's discovery plan," says Puneet Tiwari, a Toronto-based lawyer and CEO and co-founder of Evichat Inc., an e-discovery tool that allows lawyers to collect and review mobile communica- tions and social media data from litigants. Tiwari says the idea of the app came to him because "almost every one of my clients had mobile-based evidence they wanted to send me, in screenshots," which can be fake or tampered with and are not searchable, he says. Evichat pulls the data natively from the platforms and makes it easy to search, analyze and export, he adds. The amount of interest in and customers for the app to date, on both sides of our border, indicates the extent to which social media use has become ubiquitous and its increased use in litigation, he says. "It's an odd law firm that says their clients don't use social media," and, for many, texting has replaced email as a form of electronic communication and is "almost exclusively" used as evidence over email in family law cases, he says. Social media evidence is commonly used in family law, when estranged spouses battle each other, as well as in insurance investiga- tions for personal injury claims, and in crimi- nal cases where harassment occurs through social media and/or texting. Litigators need a sophisticated understanding of social media to use it effectively in court By Elizabeth Raymer THE (SOCIAL MEDIA) EVIDENCE IS CLEAR L I T I G A T I O N L E G A L R E P O R T SÉBASTIEN THIBAULT

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