10 Things that all personal injury clients should heed regarding social media:
1) The law requires that whatever existed at the time of your injury must be preserved. Even inadvertent deletion of a client’s social media information could result in the dismissal of a client’s claim. So, archive all of your social media content after you have discussed the same with your injury lawyer.
2) Deactivate or stop using your social media. If deactivation is not possible, then after saving your information take down all information from your page that could touch upon your injury, the injury causing event or your physical or mental condition. Then avoid all future posts.
3) Turn on the highest privacy settings.
4) Make sure all of your friends are really your “friends” and review your settings to insure that only true friends are privy to the most private of your information.
5) Make yourself invisible by selecting “only friends” under search visibility.
6) After archiving, take down all photos and untag all photos of yourself that are not simple head shots.
7) Remember that anything you write is public and it’s just like you are writing it on a poster board and taking it to the courthouse and hanging it on the lobby wall for all to see. Be very thoughtful about what is written.
8) If you change phones, tablets, computers etc, keep the old ones or back them up on an external hard drive. If you do not, the other side can argue that you purposefully discarded the material and your case should be dismissed.
9) Never speak about the case or discussions with your lawyer even in private messages. This includes private messages to your lawyer as they are not private since they are being posted on a third party’s server.
10) Do not join or continue to be a member of a chat group as many of them are easily searchable.