February
6
2012
Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?
February 2, 2012 – by Christian Jarrett
Social l networking sites have changed our lives. There were 500 million active Facebook users in 2011 and approximately 200 million Twitter accounts. As users will know, the sites have important differences. Facebook places more of an emphasis on who you are and who you know. Twitter restricts users to 140-character updates and is more about what you say than who you are. A new study asks whether and how the way people use these sites is related to their personality, and whether there are personalty differences between people who prefer one site over the other.
David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online – most (70 per cent) were based in Europe, others were from North America, Asia and beyond.
February
2
2012
From the February 2012 issue of Claims Magazine
Social media has quickly become the foremost activity on the Internet. The explosive growth in user-generated content has been a boon for insurance claims adjusters and fraud investigators. Navigating the social media landscape, however, can be tricky.
When the World Wide Web was established, early websites were mostly electronic versions of documents. They did a good job at broadcasting information to a wide audience but were not effective at brokering communication. With the advent of Web 2.0 and social media platforms such as Facebook,YouTube, and Twitter, bidirectional communication became one of the key reasons to use the Web.
The adoption rate for the use of social media in our daily lives is astounding. When radio was introduced, it took 38 years to reach 50 million people. Television was faster, reaching 50 million in only 13 years. The iPod reached this milestone in three years. Facebook did it in mere months. Social media technology is changing the way the world communicates. Half of all mobile Internet traffic in the U.K. is for Facebook. It should be pointed out that it’s not just kids using social media sites. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 46 percent of all American adults use at least one social networking site.
There are literally hundreds of social media sites on the Web today offering platforms for sharing all kinds of information, including photos, videos, status updates, and location check-ins. This has resulted in an explosion of user-generated content. Today, we create as much information in two days as we did from the beginning of time through 2003.
January
26
2012
BY ANNE BLYTHE - ABLYTHE@NEWSOBSERVER.COM
RALEIGH — When prosecutors and defense attorneys in the murder trial of Jason Young agreed on one man for the jury panel, they were unaware that he might be a bit of a Web personality, too.
On Wednesday, defense attorneys asked Wake County Superior Court Judge Don Stephens for permission to ask more questions of a man they contend posted to The Wolf Web, an unofficial N.C. State University message board, that he and another woman in the jury pool would be “the worst jurors ever.”
January
20
2012
The rules governing e-discovery apply to social media and trump both a social media website’s privacy guidelines and an individual user’s privacy preferences.
By Aaron D. Crews
January 20, 2012 08:41 AM ET
Computerworld - From time to time, new communications technologies force courts and legislatures to adapt existing standards and even develop entirely new ones. The telephone raised issues related to wiretapping, among other things. Email became a factor in litigation-related discovery actions. Social media is likely to do the same, if only because use of such sites has become so widespread.
Over the last several years, user participation in social media websites has exploded. For example, Facebook claims to have more than 800 million users on its network, Twitter users post something approaching 150 million tweets a day, and YouTube claims that more video is uploaded to its site every month than the three major U.S. networks created in the last 60 years. Such statistics tend to confirm that social media websites are here to stay, and their emergence as commonplace communication platforms suggests that the law will have to take notice.
For example, websites’ privacy guidelines might not carry much weight when it comes to litigation. When a lawsuit is filed, attorneys inevitably scour the Internet for evidence relevant to the claims and parties, which frequently leads to one or more social media websites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media users (and lawyers representing them in litigation) should realize that data posted on social media websites is likely subject to review and disclosure when relevant to the issues in a lawsuit, without regard to the particular website’s privacy guidelines or the user’s privacy settings.
Social media postings also raise issues involving evidence preservation. In state and federal courts, the parties to a lawsuit must undertake reasonable measures to preserve (and to prevent the destruction of) evidence that might be relevant to the claims and defenses in the case. Furthermore, virtually every jurisdiction in the United States allows parties to a lawsuit to demand the production of information that is either relevant to the matters at issue in the lawsuit or reasonably likely to lead to the identification of other relevant evidence.
How might these rules be applied to data posted on social media websites?
January
6
2012
JANUARY 6, 2012, 11:18 AM
By Joe Palazzolo
How good are you, experienced civil trial lawyer, at predicting jury verdicts? We imagine a few of you are known around the firm for your preternatural eye for separating the good cases from the dogs, for knowing when to settle and when to press on, or you’re known for thinking you have this talent and telling everyone so.
But every lawyer needs a second opinion, or even a 20th, from their colleagues, and they’d do well to heed them, according to a new study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.
In the study, experienced trial attorneys were shown short descriptions of real civil cases (in California) and asked to predict the outcome in four rounds.
In the first round, they gave their own opinion. In Round Two, they were allowed to view the opinion of another experienced trial lawyer and revise their estimate as they saw fit. In Round Three, they were forced to negotiate a single estimate. And in the fourth round, they made a final estimate, with the option of drawing on their previous predictions or disregarding them.
You see where this is going, right? The trial attorneys let their egos get in the way, and they paid for it.
About 83% of the attorneys gave their own opinion more weight than their partner’s opinion, and 53% ignored their partner’s opinion entirely.
The attorneys made more accurate predictions when they treated their partner as an equal and gave his or her opinion 50% weight, said Jonas Jacobson, a trial consultant in San Francisco who co-authored the study, in an email. But attorneys slid backwards in the fourth round, when left again to their own devices.
When researchers averaged the opinions of all the attorneys in the study — tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd” — they came within 25% of the actual verdict — remarkable, considering the case descriptions were only a few basic paragraphs.
“This suggests that, as a group, the attorneys were able to distill what really matters from a few key facts. Of course this requires them to be willing to average with each other,” Jacobson said.
The study’s moral is simple, he said.
“No matter how confident you are in your own opinion, trust the opinion of an experienced partner. Even better, find the opinions of 20 experienced attorneys and statistically combine them. Attorneys’ predictions of jury verdicts will be much more accurate for it.”
December
22
2011
I thought this was a very compelling article written by Ken Broda-Bahm.
Also remember when speaking with your experts/witnesses it is important to understand the “universal truth”.
All of these concepts address presenting your case in a cohesive, consistent manner for the widest latitude of acceptance.
If I don’t speak to you before Sunday, have a wonderful holiday! Hope you are having a wonderful time with your friends and family.
October
31
2011
California will criminalize “tweeting by jurors”
What are your thoughts?
October
18
2011
The Folly of Damage Caps: More Evidence
Posted by on Friday, October 14, 2011
- Medical Malpractice
- Politics
- Trial Practice
Public Citizen, a group devoted to studying these sorts of things, provides more evidence of the folly of damage caps. If the movie Hot Coffee did not close the deal, a recent analysis of Texas’ medical malpractice reform should. ”Tort Reform” was probably the most cynical American political construct since McCarthyism.
Seeking to hurt the trial lawyer financial base of the Democratic Party, political strategists (i.e., Karl Rove) crafted mythical arguments in their anti-civil justice system crusade. Where it used to be that individual Americans, regardless of their station in life, could hold the wealthiest and most powerful interests accountable for negligence and wrongdoing, Karl Rove and his political followers went to war on the system. Knowing that attorneys who handle these cases on contingency fee are frequent contributors to Democrats, Rove crafted a strategy that would hoodwink the American people, play on their prejudices, and hurt the trial bar financially. The strategy was to cap damages in civil cases. By legislatively and arbitrarily capping damages at $250,000, Rove would limit the amount of money trial attorneys could recover on contingency fees. This would wipe out the trial bar, limit their ability to handle cases for people who could only afford contingency fees, and strip the Democrats of resources. It would make the powerful interest omnipotent, no longer accountable to the American people. The strategy relied on pubic antipathy toward lawyers, demonization of lawyers, and rabid anti-lawyer bias. It ignored the consequences, and it ignored the value and credibility of the American citizen jury.
October
12
2011
From Conrad Murray to Casey Anthony, how social media is impacting jury selection and trial strategy
KPCC
Richard Drew/AFP/Getty Images
Trial consultants are now using data collected from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
Trial consultants are now using data collected from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
The manslaughter trial of Michael Jackson’s personal doctor, Conrad Murray, streamed live from the courtroom Tuesday. Increasingly social media sites and the blogosphere are crowded with opinions about every twist and turn in the case. Legal experts say those comments are expected to influence the way the defense and prosecution make their cases to the jury.
Trial observer Diana Greninger researches trial strategies at Trial Consultants Inc. and told KPCC’s Patt Morrison on Tuesday that social media will only be one aspect of the lawyer’s strategy.
“It’s not by any means to be used 100 percent for the strategy. It just guides us as to, you know, what we should focus on, what people like to see, what bores them, what entices them, what makes them lean one way or the other, which is what the jurors are actually gonna do,” she said.
Greninger added that attorneys should take online comments with a grain of salt, since the public only sees a small portion of the evidence that jurors do.
October
6
2011
By Diana Greninger from Trial Consultants, Inc.
and Amy Singer, Ph.D. from Trial Consultants, Inc.
– September 26, 2011
Today’s online environment has brought about new possibilities and along with it, new terms. For years, trial consultants have had the option to conduct Face-to-Face Focus Groups and Online Research. Now, with the unprecedented influence of Social Media, trial consultants can take Online Research to another level with Social Media Analysis.
Read more…