Whether you like it or not, social media has a major impact on the legal battlefield and both individuals and businesses must navigate this world with great caution. Facebook says more than a billion people are active on its site. Twitter claims to have more than 150 million tweets per day from some 980 million accounts. YouTube has some 300 hours of video uploaded every minute. Instagram claims that more than 100 million people use its service every month. Other booming social media sites such as LinkedIn, Vine, Foursquare, WeChat, Viber, WhatsApp and SnapCha and others have legions of users. This is a tsunami of documents that can reveal a vast amount of information – good and bad and everything in between. Social In the same way that email became a rich source of investigative material a decade ago, social media is increasingly entering courtrooms with the potential to overturn disputes. “Just a minute”… you say. I have all these “privacy” settings on my social media sites or some of my posts and/or blogs are password protected. It doesn't matter. If information is relevant to a lawsuit, it may be discoverable even if it is subject to your privacy settings. Almost all jurisdictions in the United States now allow electronic discovery of social media information. The art is that lawyers can't just take a shotgun approach and ask everything. If attorneys accurately describe why they are requesting specific information on social media and highlight its relevance to the case, it can be obtained. Bottom line: In civil litigation, an individual's privacy preferences and the privacy protocols of social media websites will take precedence over applicable regulations. Take, for example, the disgruntled employee who claims to have a hostile workplace. Social media evidence may reveal a workplace that is not at all hostile. Or what about the company that intentionally or even inadvertently misappropriates copyrighted material for its website? This is irrefutable proof for all to see! The question today, of course, for individuals and businesses alike, given the prevalence of social media, is how to protect themselves from legal liability. Social media exposure and potential liability can be significant. What happens if one of your employees posts something on a company blog that could expose them to liability? What happens if one of your employees attends a party as an individual and makes an unauthorized comment about the company? What happens if someone at your public company makes an unauthorized announcement on a Facebook or Twitter page? The law states that all investors must receive important information about the company simultaneously so as not to affect stock prices. Recently, the boss of Netflix misspoke and boasted that his online streaming service had reached the plateau of one billion views before being announced elsewhere. What happens if someone in your company reposts a copyrighted photo for your company website without permission? This could represent a huge blunder 150 000 $