The Sedona Conference^® (TSC) and its Working Group 7 (Sedona Canada) recently announced the publication of the Sedona Canada Commentary on Discovery of Social Media.

This 88-page PDF Commentary, available here for free download, builds on similar principles and guidelines regarding social media developed by the Sedona Conference Working Group 1 for the United States, including The Sedona Conference Primer on Social Media, first published in 2012 and updated in 2019. However, this Commentary focuses on the regulatory and practice requirements of the Canadian legal profession.

Section II of the Commentary discusses traditional and emerging social media technologies and the discovery challenges they present. Section III examines relevance and proportionality in the context of social media. It also explores preservation challenges, collection, and search obligations, together with review and production considerations. Section IV describes the impact of cross-border issues on social media discovery, and Section V explores authentication issues. The Commentary concludes in Section VI by analyzing ethical issues that lawyers should consider in connection with social media discovery

The Commentary was first published for public comment in June 2021. Where appropriate, comments received during the public-comment period have been incorporated into the final version.

As noted above, you can download a copy of the Commentary on Discovery of Social Media here (login required, which is free).

So, what do you think?  Are you encountering social media ESI in your discovery projects?  Do any of those have cross-border implications?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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