Facebook Is An Acceptable Way to Serve Legal Papers, New York Judge Rules

Wow. This gives the concept of adding friends a whole new meaning. 

Legal systems around the world have slowly and sporadically acknowledged the importance of digital life by melding the tangible with the intangible. This has becoming increasingly true with regard to document submission. Some courts will not even accept physical copies anymore.

But the news that New York now finds Facebook an acceptable way to serve papers is significant because it is (or fancies itself) the epicenter of global legal action. This may hasten the advent of social media as a growing source of legal activity. The case in point, interestingly, involves a divorced male spouse demanding that his ex-wife continue to pay child support. He requested to use Facebook because his ex-wife refused to respond to email or letters but was active on the social network.

That a man receiving child support from a woman - and that the child in question is over the age of 21 simply underscores how notions of tradition are changing.

It may also raise Facebook users' concerns about its sometimes self-serving approach to privacy to a new level of paranoia. JL

Jeff Roberts reports in GigaOm:

Under the rules of service, people can use a variety of methods to deliver a document, including delivering it in person or to their lawyer or, in some cases, by email. If those don’t work, they can apply to the court to try another method — such as, in this case, social media.
Maybe this is why some teens think Facebook is for old people: a New York father just got permission to use the social network to notify his ex-wife about changes to their child support arrangement.
According to family court judge Gregory Gliedman, Facebook was an acceptable form of “alternate service” since Noel Biscocho couldn’t locate his ex-wife, Anna Maria Antigua. The legal dispute turned on a request by Antigua to stop paying child support because his son had reached the age of 21.
In a court order, the judge described how Biscocho had tried all sorts of other methods to locate Antigua, including texting his children for her address and doing a “search on the Google search engine.”

But, the judge noted, even though Antigua could not be found, she was active on Facebook — and had even “Liked” photos posted by Biscocho’s current wife. As a result, the judge concluded that Biscocho could take the unprecedented step of using Facebook to serve the order, provided that he also mailed a copy to Antigua’s last known address.

The judge added that Facebook had not been used as a means of service in New York state court, but that other courts have allowed it, including in Virginia.
Under the rules of service, people can use a variety of methods to deliver a document, including delivering it in person or to their lawyer or, in some cases, by email. If those don’t work, they can apply to the court to try another method — such as, in this case, social media.
The use of Facebook by courts is not new, though it has been to slow to arrive in the U.S. Australia allowed it in 2009, and U.K. courts did the same in 2011. But in 2012, a court in Manhattan said a bank could not use Facebook to serve papers on an identity thief.