By Brian Malcom
Social media is becoming a crime-fighting weapon, and criminal defense attorneys are catching on. For some reason, most people believe that there is anonymity on the Internet. This is an especially absurd belief when people go through great pains to make themselves as visible as possible in social media.
A Nashville, Tennessee criminal defense attorney named David Raybin immediately advises his clients to shut down their Facebook account. I suspect that he is not the only criminal defense attorney giving this advice to his clients. Lately, there has been an increased use of social media by police investigations.
The ABA Journal writes, "USA Today notes several cases throughout the country in which police investigations were bolstered by taking time to explore YouTube, Flickr and other online message boards:"
What can a young lawyer learn from this? Well if you are interested in going into criminal defense, you may want to advise your client to immediately delete their social media account. If you are not interested in criminal defense, maybe you should just take this as a yet another example that social media can be dangerous.
I would place good money on the fact that all bar organizations are already trolling social media outlets for information about bar applicants, committee applicants, and practicing attorneys under investigation for ethical misconduct. This may be a good time to take down the picture of you doing a keg stand at last month's young lawyers get together.
Reminder about my rule of thumb: never post anything on the Internet you don't want your employer to see. Thanks to cache technology, anything posted to the Internet will exist forever in cyberspace.