The Problem with Social Media and Family Law

In this video, Accredited Specialist in Family Law and Award Winning Family Lawyer, Stephen Page, discusses the problem with social media and family law.

Transcript

G’day, I’m Stephen Page from Page Provan Family and Fertility Lawyers. And today, I’m talking about the role of social media evidence in family law proceedings. And I’m going to start with a joke. The old joke was about divorce. Did you hear about Divorced Barbie? She got the goldmine, and Ken got the shaft. And you might say, okay, well, what’s that got to do with this topic? And that is, social media postings are goldmines for family lawyers. And they can often be very time-consuming, as I’m discovering at the moment. Because I say social media, but really, I’m putting two categories in there. One is social media postings, and the other are SMS messages between partners. Each of these are documents. If you want to talk about the difference between a social worker and a lawyer, social workers are really good on people. Lawyers are not so good. But lawyers are really good on documents. We love looking at documents. Social workers are not so good. They’re not so interested in documents. But we look at documents because there’s a clear evidence a document was created for a particular purpose, and it speaks for itself. It may not be the purpose for what’s said about it, but it says something, and it can be very, very helpful or harmful to a case.

So social media. If posts are being put on Facebook or Instagram, for example, or Twitter occasionally, then lo and behold, a family lawyer comes along and sucks them all up in the litigation vacuum cleaner. So one of the things is, if you are contemplating separating, be careful of what you put up, be careful of who your friends are. You may have excluded your ex, but lo and behold, there’s lots of people who are sending that information back, and bagging your ex on there will come back to bite you. I have lost count of the number of times where I’ve put a Facebook post up, and it occasionally, an Instagram post up, where one party has bagged the other. Really, really dumb stuff. Look at your security settings. But even better, make sure that you’re very careful about what you post. General rule, don’t put anything up that’s negative. I wouldn’t put up anything that also says about your court case. I had a trial a couple of years ago where I couldn’t believe it. The other lawyer put up a post on Facebook about how wonderful she’d done in her case, and the case wasn’t concluded.

There was a discussion then that this was really inappropriate and potentially prejudicial to the Administration of Justice. The post came down. So you’ve always got to think about what is the impact if I’m posting about my court case? Generally, bad. The other aspect is if you’re sending messages to each other. Now, you might be doing it by Insta, you might be doing it by Facebook, for example. But if you’re sending it by SMS, the thinking by many clients is, Well, I’ll reach for the phone and I’ll do a screenshot. Please don’t. If you’ve got an iPhone, go to the app SMS export. It’s cheap and there’s similar apps for Android, but it downloads all the text messages, and it comes out as though it’s a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. Marvellous. It makes it It’s so much easier for the lawyers to go copy, paste, copy, paste. Saves a lot of legal time for lawyers, therefore, saves cost to you. Over and above whatever the app cost is. And there it is in black and white what you’ve sent each other. So very, very helpful tool. And of course, if you’re writing text messages to the other party, remember that they can keep copies too, and they can use them against you later.

Be very careful about what you write. Thank you for watching. I’m Stephen Page from Page Provan Family and Fertility Lawyers.