How does social media play into the divorce discovery process?
Jimmie: We have found that people in general are becoming their own detectives and they’re doing their own social media searching, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, anything that they can get their hands on, anything that would have their spouse’s name on it. So, as far as if you’re going through a divorce, what should you be concerned about, my recommendation would be you should be concerned about every single thing that you’ve ever put on the internet because somewhere along the way it’s there and someone might be able to find it.
In Facebook many people can have things removed from their page, but you don’t know whether or not the spouse may have already done screen shots of that Facebook page prior to the item being taken down. So, Facebook is a wonderful social media tool, but it’s also a tool that people can use against each other in regards to divorce. For example, things that they’ve done, pictures that they put up, people that they were with, when were they there, what dates and times when they might have said that they were someplace else being caught in lies. The Facebook timeline is another great tool that it’s kind of hard to manipulate, and it gives evidence of one party to the other party to see what the spouse has been doing.
James Lawrence Knox is a partner at Milligan, Beswick, Levine & Knox, LLP. For almost three decades, Mr. Knox has been providing aggressive legal representation to clients facing criminal charges, as well as individuals involved in family law issues or facing administrative law proceedings. Mr. Knox, along with the other members of our legal team, is firmly committed to putting the needs of clients first and has a long and distinguished track record to show that he is a skillful litigator and knowledgeable legal professional.