Divorce attorneys really like Facebook

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/06/2012 (5050 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Wall Street Journal’s blog Smart Money reported that although founder Mark Zuckerberg recently took the leap into marriage, Facebook is itself is prompting many divorces around the world, and justices are getting wise, and using evidence on Facebook during divorce hearings.

Smart Money said more than a third of divorce filings in the U.K. last year contained the word Facebook, according to a survey by Divorce Online, a U.K.-based legal services firm. And over 80 per cent of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Gary Traystman, a divorce attorney in New London, Conn., told Smart Money that of the 15 cases he handles per year where computer history, texts and emails are admitted as evidence, 60 per cent exclusively involve Facebook.

“Affairs happen with a lightning speed on Facebook,” says K. Jason Krafsky, who wrote the book Facebook and Your Marriage with his wife Kelli. In the real world, he says, office romances and out-of-town trysts can take months or even years to develop. “On Facebook,” he says, “they happen in just a few clicks.” The social network is different from most social networks or dating sites in that it both reconnects old flames and allows people to “friend” someone they only may have met once in passing. “It puts temptation in the path of people who would never in a million years risk having an affair,” he says.

Even when extra-marital affairs develop with no help from Facebook, experts say the site provides a deceptively comfortable forum for people to let off steam about their lives and inadvertently arouse the suspicions of spouses. “The difference with Facebook is it feels safe, innocent and private,” says Randy Kessler, an Atlanta, Ga.-based lawyer and current chair of the family law section of the American Bar Association. “People put an enormous amount of incriminating stuff out there voluntarily.” It could be something as innocuous as a check-in at a restaurant, he says, or a photograph posted online.

Courts are increasingly examining Facebook for evidence, also, the blog reported.

Last year, a superior district court judge in Connecticut ordered a divorcing couple to hand over the passwords of their respective Facebook accounts to the other’s lawyers.

— McClatchy Tribune News Service