Virtual Service of Process

YouTube is going to the Guggenheim, and Twitter and Facebook could be the future avenues for service of process.

Service of process has traditionally been a person to person exchange, a hand delivery of legal documents. Doctors do not make house calls, but lawyers do via sheriffs’ deputies or authorized process servers.

It is not always the easiest job to deliver lawsuits, especially if folks do not want to receive them, even when it is in a person’s best interest to be well-informed. Singapore’s top court is considering use of social media to get the job done. Facebook and Twitter are already serving legal documents in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Just as YouTube is trying to grow up into a sophisticated age of arts and culture, social networking sites could become legal avenues of service, finding folks where footwork is less effective.


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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Served Legal Papers

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently received a side dish of legal papers with his lunch while at a media lunch event on Saturday in Idaho.

According to an article in the NY Post, he was sitting with COO Sheryl Sandberg when someone approached their table, asked for Zuckerberg's signature and stated, "You've been served."

What the lawsuit is about is not clear. The NY Post indicates that a Facebook spokeswoman had "no immediate details" about the lawsuit.

Zack Whittaker, who writes the iGeneration blog on ZDNet posted some updated information on the situation on Sunday.

I spoke to ZDNet blogger Denise Howell, a qualified lawyer in regards to this to try and get a better perspective of this issue ... Howell said, "Long story short, the law specifies ‘personal service’ for things like a summons and complaint or a subpoena ... Service by ambush like this is something more the province of collection actions against deadbeats, not captains of industry in Sun Valley. Seems like there’s some kind of embarrassment-related agenda at work here perhaps.”

Hard to say what the alleged lawsuit is about but the facts behind it are likely to surface over the next few days. After all, there's nothing faster than the social media grapevine.

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