Labor & Employment Law

Attorneys Using Social Networking Sites For Jury Selection

We have blogged and spoken quite a bit recently about using on line resources such as MySpace and Facebook for employment and recruiting purposes.  An interesting article in today's LA Times reports on another use for this information -- jury selection.

For example, Marshall Hennington, a psychologist who does work as a jury consultant relates how one prospective juror denied knowing a fellow jury candidate, but his Facebook page revealed the two were actually cousins.  The revelation apparently got the juror dismissed for cause.   As the article explains:

Hennington has no qualms about plumbing the Internet for information damaging to the opposition."They're not giving me a call because they have a slam-dunk case. Clients call me because they know they have a difficult case and need to sell it to the jurors," Hennington said. As long as the information obtained about a juror is publicly available and of use to a client, "everything is fair game," he said. "This is war."

Full post as published by California Labor & Employment Defense Blog on September 29, 2008 (boomark / email).