Per all recent case law on the subject, including for instance EEOC v. Simply Storage, social media evidence is considered Electronically Stored Information (ESI) on the same par as email and electronic files. This means that the various eDiscovery provisions of The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) apply to social media. FRCP rule 34(b) requires that ESI be produced pursuant to a discovery request “in a form or forms in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a form or forms that are reasonably usable” unless the requesting party specifies a different format at the time of the request. Parties seeking formal discovery and who invoke the Rule 34(b) specification at the time of the discovery request are typically instructing that the responsive ESI be produced in native format with all metadata intact.
Without the right technology, producing social media evidence in native format with all metadata intact can be a difficult task at best and may lead to spoliation liability as a worst case but not far-fetched scenario. Social media archive solutions typically have very limited export capabilities and do not generally support native file and metadata export directly into review platforms. For this reason, X1 Social Discovery was developed collect and preserve social media in its native format and to integrate with leading attorney review and production platform Concordance. In fact, this Thursday, December 8, LexisNexis will be featuring X1 Social Discovery as part of their CLE webinar outlining best practices process and technology for addressing social media evidence. The webinar speakers will be expert E-Discovery attorney Shannon Capone Kirk of Ropes & Gray and Don Swanson of Five Star Legal and Compliance Systems, Inc. Shannon will discuss the state of the law and recommended processes and Don will demonstrate a seamless and integrated workflow between X1 Social Discovery and Concordance. You can register for the CLE webinar at this link here.
The LexisNexis webinar will highlight that social media evidence collected, preserved, searched, analyzed and tagged with X1 Social Discovery can be quickly and seamlessly exported into Concordance while maintaining native file format and all metadata. We recently heard from one customer who exported thousands of tagged social media items from X1 Social Discovery into Concordance in a manner of minutes. We believe this functionality regarding scalable native file social media export is one of the many X1 Social Discovery features that are unique to the eDiscovery field. But I invite you to attend the webinar to assess this claim yourself.