A Schuylkill County judge has denied without prejudice the discovery request of an automobile accident defendant seeking access into his opponents’ social media accounts. The court’s reasoning falls in line with the burgeoning body of common pleas jurisprudence as attorneys wait for an appellate court to issue a ruling on social media discovery.
Court of Common Pleas Judge John E. Domalakes endorsed the growing school of judicial thought that there must be a showing on a litigant’s publicly available social media page to warrant discovery into his or her whole private accounts. The standard, what Domalakes identified as a showing of a "factual predicate," has been used in most cases in either granting or denying similar discovery requests.
