Cases involving emojis are still on the rise! Don’t believe me? The guy who has been tracking them for twenty years says it’s so!

Eric Goldman, who is the Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, has been tracking cases involving emoticons and emojis on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog since 2004. A couple of weeks ago, he published his 2023 Emoji Law Year-in-Review, which shows that there were at least 225 cases last year referencing emojis or emoticons. Not surprisingly, almost all of those involve emojis – 216, with only 9 involving emoticons.

Eric notes that the 225 number “will grow a bit due to lags with the electronic databases”. So, it could go higher. Even if it doesn’t, the 2023 count represented a 17% increase over the 2022 count of 192 cases (177 with emojis, 15 with emoticons).

The trends illustrated in the chart below show just how dramatic the rise of cases involving emojis has been – Eric didn’t even track his first case involving emojis until 2014 – just ten years ago! That year, there was a single case referencing emojis, so the rise has been stratospheric!

Eric also stated: “2023 marked a significant milestone: my census now counts over 1,000 total U.S. cases referencing emojis and emoticons (the exact number is 1,017). Recall the caveat that I can only track cases I can find, so my census surely undercounts the actual number by a lot. And cases that reach the electronic databases are only a small fraction of the total judicial activity involving emojis and emoticons. View the 1,017 cases as a tip of the iceberg when it comes to courts and emojis.”

So, keep that in mind. Eric also provides emoji law highlights from 2023, with links to stories about cases involving emojis, including this one and this one covered by eDiscovery Today. Check them out here! Yet another indication that cases involving emojis are still on the rise! Better prepare for them in your eDiscovery practice!

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that the cases involving emojis have risen so quickly? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot showing a happy face emoji”.

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