Whether you like it or not, social media is having a major impact on the legal battlefield and both individuals and businesses need to navigate this world very carefully. Consider. Facebook says more than a billion people are active on its site. Twitter says it has more than 150 million tweets a day from about 980 million accounts. YouTube boasts around 300 hours of video uploaded every minute. Instagram says more than 100 million people use its service every month. Other thriving social media sites such as LinkedIn, Vine, Foursquare, WeChat, Viber, WhatsApp and SnapCha and others have legions of users. This is a tsunami of material that can reveal a wealth of information: good, bad, and everything in between. Social In the same way that email has become a rich source of information material starting about a decade ago, social media is increasingly making its way into courtrooms with the potential to turn disputes around. “Just a minute”… you say. I have all these “privacy” settings on my social media sites or some of my posts and/or blogs are password protected. It does not matter. If the information is relevant to a cause, it may be collected even if it is subject to your privacy settings. Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States now allow e-discovery of social media information. The art is that lawyers can't just use a shotgun approach and ask for everything. If lawyers carefully describe why they are asking for specific information on social media and highlight its relevance to the case, it can be obtained. Bottom line: In civil litigation both an individual's privacy preferences and the social media website's privacy protocols will yield to Take's regulations, for example, the disgruntled employee complaining of a hostile workplace. Social media evidence can reveal a workplace that isn't hostile at all. Or what about the company that intentionally or even inadvertently steals copyrighted material for its website? Talk about a smoking gun in plain sight! The question now, of course, for both individuals and businesses in the face of the prevalence of social media is how to protect themselves from legal liability. Social media exposure and potential liability can be considerable. What happens if one of you employees posts something on a company blog that is potentially liable? What happens if one of your employees attends a party as an individual and makes an unauthorized comment about the company? What happens if someone at your public company makes an unauthorized announcement on a Facebook or Twitter page? The law states that all investors should receive important company information at the same time so as not to influence stock prices. The head of Netflix recently ranted and boasted that his online streaming service had hit 1 billion views before it was announced elsewhere. What happens if someone at your company reposts a copyrighted photo for your company website without permission? This could be a huge gaffe $ 150.000