The Inbox: Everyone Calm Down Or We’ll Turn This Blog Right Around Edition

Via Law360 (subscription required), we learn of this interesting ruling from a California court, limiting Home Depot’s discovery requests seeking a former employee’s Facebook and LinkedIn posts. The court held Home Depot is only entitled to certain social media posts between the employee and other Home Depot employees, not posts with other people or that go to the former employee’s state of mind.   Social media raise many unique and interesting challenges for employment relationships -- we’ve dug deeper into these issues here, here, here, and here.

Those of us who write for Suits-by-Suits have had some contentious depositions (where a witness is asked questions in a pre-trial proceeding) in our day, but nothing like this one reported in the American Lawyer.  Two Manhattan lawyers were arguing at a deposition when one allegedly “accidently” spit on the other, and the spittee-lawyer then slapped the alleged spitter-lawyer.  Of course, one of them sued the other for slander and assault, seeking $1 million. A New York judge has now dismissed the case.   

Litigation as a way to settle disputes between companies and executives may at times get hot enough to boil away spit, but it sure beats at least one of the other alternatives. From our “How Not To Settle Executive Disputes” department, the lead sentence in this Courthouse News story says it all: “A disgruntled former partner in a law firm fire-bombed his former partners' house, the husband-and-wife legal managers claim in court.”  

The Inbox - May 16, 2012

Here's a roundup of this week's news involving suits by suits:

• An insurance company can’t subpoena its former employees’ private e-mail and phone records from Yahoo and Verizon, says a U.S. magistrate judge. Judge Geraldine Brown ruled that the subpoenas violated the Stored Communications Act, which she said creates a zone of privacy to protect against disclosure to unauthorized parties. If the employees’ Yahoo inboxes are anything like mine, the subpoenas would have just turned up a bunch of spam anyway.  Courthouse News Service.