State Workers' Compensation: Social Networking Sites as Evidence to Resolve Civil Disputes

Gregory M. Duhl (William Mitchell College of Law) and Jaclyn S. Millner (Fitch, Johnson, Larson & Held, P.A.) have uploaded Social Networking and Workers’ Compensation Law at the Crossroads to SSRN. The authors examine how social networki sites, meaning postings to them, have influenced workers’ compensation law, focusing on the intersection of professional responsibility, discovery, privacy, and evidence with social networking in state workers’ compensation systems. From the abstract:

Workers’ compensation laws are no-fault insurance systems designed to resolve disputes efficiently. Consequently, the rules of evidence are often more relaxed and the rules of discovery often more restricted than in state and federal court litigation. The flexible and self-contained structure of workers’ compensation systems provides an ideal backdrop against which to examine how information from social networking sites can be used as evidence to resolve civil disputes.

A state’s workers’ compensation system should use the rules that have traditionally applied to non-electronic information as a starting point to address issues arising from lawyers gathering and introducing into evidence information stored on social networking sites. At the same time, because of the efficiency of workers’ compensation law and the large discretion vested in its judges, workers’ compensation systems have the potential to be laboratories for new technologies and how they can be used in the resolution of disputes, both inside and outside of workers’ compensation.

Hat tip to Mitchell Rubinstein's Adjunct Law Prof Blog post. [JH]