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Saturday, June 09, 2007
Courts - More on: Litigants Blogging
On May 31st, in this ILB entry titled "Litigants Blogging," the focus was a doctor defending himself in a malpractice suit who also had been blogging about the case. Today, in this National Law Journal story by Stacey Laskin, we have more details about the case. And some suggestions:
"Just like anything else a client may have written or said in a lecture, it is a potential source of prior impeaching information." Lindeman's action "seems to me like such an obviously stupid thing to do," said Ken Withers, the director of judicial education and content for The Sedona Conference, an Arizona-based nonprofit research organization, which publishes a guide to confidentiality and public access."Some people live in a fantasy world," he said. "They believe what they say or do on the Internet is somehow private. They may believe that running a blog shields them from identity -- it does not. It would be no great effort for anyone to discover the source of a posting or the host." A New Hampshire case involving a juror who posted entries about court duty on his blog raised similar concerns earlier this year, prompting legal experts to predict that warnings on blogging may become a regular part of jury instructions and voir dire.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 9, 2007 10:48 AM
Posted to Courts in general