How to Get Sanctioned for Deleting Facebook Posts

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I social media. I don’t know how I’d get through this pandemic without it. That live performance by the Rolling Stones that I saw on Twitter last week was just what I needed.

Social media in litigation, on the other hand, can really cause lawyers some headaches. Here are some of the questions it raises:

  • Does the duty to preserve evidence apply to material a client posts on social media?
  • Should lawyers give clients guidance about preservation of social media during a lawsuit?
  • Can a party’s social media posts be used against the party in court?
  • Should lawyers give clients guidance about what they post on social media during a lawsuit?
  • Should lawyers prepare their clients to testify about what they did with social media?
  • If a client deletes relevant social media content during a lawsuit, should the client’s lawyer lie about it?

I’m willing to bet most of my Fivers already know the answers to these questions.

But I bet a smaller number of my lawyer readers regularly do the following:

(1) Specifically advise the client in writing to preserve relevant social media content at the beginning of a litigation matter

(2) Specifically advise the client to avoid posting anything on social media that could be used against the client in the lawsuit.

(3) Specifically prepare the client to answer deposition questions about use and preservation of social media.

This could be a problem. Let me share a couple cautionary tales.

The “Hot Moms” T-Shirt Case

You may have heard about Allied Concrete v. Lester. The case had some funny facts, but it arose from a real tragedy: a concrete truck crossed the center line on the Thomas Jefferson Parkway in Virginia, tipped over, and crushed a vehicle driven by Isaiah Lester, injuring him and killing his wife Jessica. Lester sued the concrete company. Allied Concrete Co. v. Lester, 736 S.E.2d 699, 701 (Va. 2013).

So far, this sounds like a typical, though tragic, personal injury suit. But it had a social media angle. When Lester filed suit in in May 2008, he had an account with Facebook, which had first become available to the public less than two years earlier.

Lester’s lawyer was the managing partner of his firm’s Charlottesville office and had over 30 years of experience. But he was apparently not an “early adopter” of social media. His lack of experience with social media may have contributed to the following chain of events:

1/9/09: Lester sent a Facebook message to Allied Concrete’s lawyer.

3/25/09: Allied Concrete requested production of all pages from Lester’s Facebook page, attaching a photo from Lester’s Facebook page. The photo showed Lester “accompanied by other individuals,” holding a beer can, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “I hot moms.”

3/26/09: Murray instructed his paralegal, Marlina Smith, to tell Lester to “clean up” his Facebook page cause “we don’t want any blow-ups of this stuff at trial.” She emailed Lester about the photo and also said there were “some other pics that should be deleted” from his Facebook page.

4/14/09: Lester told Smith he had deleted his Facebook page.

4/15/09: Lester signed a discovery response stating “I do not have a Facebook page on the date this is signed.”

5/11/09: After Allied Concrete filed a motion to compel, Lester reactivated his Facebook page, the paralegal printed copies of it, and Lester then deleted 16 photos from it.

5/14/09: Murray produced the printouts of the Facebook page to Allied Concrete.

12/16/09: Lester testified in his deposition that he had never deactivated his Facebook page. This resulted in Allied Concrete serving a subpoena on Facebook and hiring an expert who determined that Lester deleted 16 photos. All 16 photos were ultimately produced to Allied Concrete.

9/28/10: Allied Concrete requested production of emails between Lester and Smith between 3/25/09 and 5/15/09.

11/28/10: Murray filed a privilege log that intentionally omitted any reference to his 3/26/09 email to Smith.

Id. at 701-3.

You can see from this chronology that Murray, Smith, and Lester went wrong in several obvious ways:

(1) Lester deleting potentially relevant posts and deactivating his Facebook page.

(2) Lester falsely testifying that he had never deactivated his Facebook page.

(3) Murray filing a privilege log that intentionally omitted the most damning email.

You don’t need to know a lot of details about social media, legal ethics, or the duty to preserve evidence to know that these things were wrong.

And the consequences were severe. As sanctions, the trial court ordered Murray to pay $542,000 and Lester to pay $180,000 to cover Allied Concrete’s attorney’s fees and costs to address the misconduct. Id. at 703. The trial court also allowed the jury to see all the spoliated evidence and twice instructed the jury on Lester’s misconduct. Id. at 705.

And when it was all over, Murray had to agree to a five-year suspension of his law license. You can read the Virginia State Bar Disciplinary Board’s order here.

You might think the lesson is obvious: don’t let your client spoliate evidence and then lie to the court about it.

But there’s a less obvious lesson in the Allied Concrete case. From the start, Lester’s lawyer got off on the wrong foot by issuing the vague directive to “clean up” the Facebook page. He could have avoided later problems by giving the client specific written advice on (1) what he needed to do to comply with the duty to preserve relevant evidence and (2) what to avoid posting.

But I don’t want to be too hard on the lawyer. From his suspension order, you get the feeling that this was his first rodeo as to Facebook. Today we all understand how Facebook works, but did we know that 11 years ago? Today, how many of us know about wickr? Or Whisper? Or confide? Heck, most us probably don’t even know how to post a “story” on Instagram.

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Sure, you know Facebook. But do you know all of these?

Yes, the conduct in Allied Concrete was egregious, especially the lying. But my big takeaway is that even now, we’re all just a couple bad decisions away from getting in hot water over social media evidence.

A more recent case really brings this home.

The “I have the right to do whatever I want” case

In Nutrition Distribution LLC v. PEP Research, LLC, No. 16-CV-2328, 2018 WL 3769162 (S.D. Cal. Aug. 9, 2018), the court sanctioned a defendant for deleting relevant social media posts after the case was filed. The case teaches the importance of preserving social media evidence and preparing your client to testify about social media.

Nutrition Distribution was, from what I gather from the pleadings, sort of a “false advertising troll.” In other words, it sounds like it was more in the business of filing lawsuits against other companies for false advertising than marketing its own products. So you know the defendant, an online seller offering a controversial weight-loss supplement called Clenbuterol, was already highly irritated about getting sued in the first place.

This frustration boiled over in the deposition of Brent Reynders, an individual defendant and representative of the corporate defendant. Here’s a taste (I’m paraphrasing some of the questions):

Q: And since the lawsuit was filed in September 2016, have you deleted any posts from your Facebook?

A: Yes.

Q: Did the deleted posts have anything to do with this lawsuit?

A: It’s possible. Actually, it was—I think it had more to do with any copycat companies, law firms like yours trying to file the same frivolous lawsuit.

Q: Did you delete posts related to the marketing of Clenbuterol?

A: I have the right to do whatever I want to do with my Facebook account, regardless of a lawsuit or not. If I wanted to—if I want to delete every single post on my Facebook page, I have the right to do so.

Id. at *16.

I can just picture Mr. Reynders’ lawyer cringing. You’re not fully a litigator until you’ve had to sit quietly while your client gives deposition testimony like this.

And that was just the beginning. Nutrition Strategies filed a motion for sanctions for spoliation of evidence, asking for the dreaded “adverse inference instruction.” That’s an instruction telling the jury that a party failed to preserve evidence and that the jury can presume the evidence would have been unfavorable to that party.

In the Ninth Circuit, the sanction of an adverse inference instruction requires proof that “(1) the party having control over the evidence had an obligation to preserve it at the time it was destroyed; (2) the records were destroyed with a culpable state of mind; and (3) the evidence was ‘relevant’ to the party’s claim or defense such that a reasonable trier of fact could find that it would support that claim or defense.” Id. at *15. The standards in other jurisdictions are pretty similar.

The magistrate judge found that each element was met. The defendant deleted relevant social media posts after the case was filed. The posts allegedly contained the very false advertising that the plaintiff was suing for, so there was no question the defendant had a duty to preserve them. The plaintiff showed that the deleted evidence was relevant because it included ads, photos, marketing, and the misleading statements at issue in the suit. Therefore, even if there was no bad faith, the plaintiff established prejudice. Id. at *16.

The defendants argued there was no prejudice because the plaintiff already had copies of the deleted posts, but the magistrate judge disagreed. There was evidence that plaintiff only had some of the posts, which it obtained in its pre-suit investigation. Id.

The magistrate judge therefore recommended an adverse inference instruction that “the social media posts deleted were false advertising of products that compete with Plaintiff.” Id. at *18.

The district court judge largely agreed. See 2018 WL 6323082 (S.D. Cal. Dec. 4, 2018). But he found that the recommended jury instruction went a little too far. Because the plaintiff’s claim was false advertising, the instruction that the deleted social media posts were false advertising that competed with plaintiff’s products was “tantamount to entry of judgment.” Or as we say in Texas, a “death penalty” sanction.

Noting that the plaintiff preserved some social media posts and that defendants offered to stipulate to the content of the posts, the district judge decided to give a less harsh instruction to the jury:

Defendants have failed to preserve social media posts for Plaintiff’s use in this litigation after Defendants’ duty to preserve arose. You may, but are not obligated to, infer that the deleted social media posts were favorable to Plaintiff and unfavorable to Defendants.

Id. at *5-6.

That’s much better for the defendants, but still pretty bad. A jury trial is hard enough. It’s near impossible when the judge gives the jury an instruction like this against your client.

So what did the jury decide? Well, actually it didn’t. There was no jury trial, because the district judge later granted summary judgment that the defendants did not publish any false advertising that competed with the plaintiff. See Order on MSJ.

You can’t always get what you want.

_______________________________

IMG_4571Zach Wolfe (zach@zachwolfelaw.com) is a Texas trial lawyer who handles non-compete and trade secret litigation at Zach Wolfe Law Firm. Thomson Reuters named him a Texas “Super Lawyer”® for Business Litigation in 2020 and 2021.

These are his opinions, not the opinions of his firm or clients, so don’t cite part of this post against him in an actual case. Every case is different, so don’t rely on this post as legal advice for your case.

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Comments:

Do you have any posts concerning whether a company in litigation can still delete comments made by others on its Facebook page? E.g., if comments are relevant to litigation, the company is hiding potential evidence. Thank you.

Good question. I think in that situation the best thing for the company to do is either not delete the comments or, if there is a good business reason to delete the comments, keep an archive copy for litigation purposes.

Thank you very much. It will be interesting to see whether the company preserves these comments. Company is suing me … but also being sued in a class-action, so they have two reasons to preserve evidence. The comments are directly relevant to whether the contraption they make actually works.