Just in case there has been any doubt, here is another example of how all electronic communications can be used in court. This eWeek article covers the recent subpoena issued by New York City, to obtain text-messaging records and recipient information related to protests during the Republican National Convention in July of 2004. The event was orchestrated through the now infamous TXTmob tool, which was created by Tad Hirsch, a doctorial candidate at MIT.

“New York attorneys ordered Hirsch to provide records of the content of the messages exchanged on TXTmob during the convention, as well as the identification of people who sent and received messages, the time the messages were sent for the duration of the event, and a list of people who used the service during the event.”

Hirsch is fighting to protect the privacy of the users of his service, but it is becoming clear that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, text-messages and for that matter all other electronic communications are admissible in court.

This raises some serious privacy concerns and makes you want to think twice of twittering about your life’s every moment.

The even bigger question is how companies must and can comply with discovery requests that are as broadly defined as seen in this case. The archiving of email messages is already adding a huge expense to corporate IT budgets. In case of litigation, the cost of retrieval and e-discovery of this archived content is often even bigger.

Companies should certainly consider these issues when leveraging new collaborative technologies.

Technorati Tags: txtmob, twitter, text-messaging, tad hirsch

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