From a recent New York Times article:

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, a waste of eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

Not to let search engines get all the fun on lawyer is seeking to overturn a judgment over juror’s twittering:

Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment, claiming that a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial.

A quick search on twitter for “jury court sitting” brings up a few gems:

The reason I point this out is to show that the cases highlighted here are not the exception, they are the norm. Odds are someone in every jury is doing some kind of online research on the background and parties involved.

That said there are two questions lawyers need to ask themselves going into every potential trial:

1. What would I be searching for on Google if I was on the jury and so inclined?

2. Are the results that come up going to help or hurt my case?

In the case that there are results showing up that can damage your client it’s time to look at online reputation management services to push down these problem listings.

With a carefully crafted reputation management strategy the search results surrounding the names of companies and individuals and be greatly influenced if not completely changed given the proper resources and time. The only limitation we face in campaigns like this is our creativity.

How to kill a web page

As you can see Matt has pointed out all kinds of new strategies for helping our clients with reputation management projects that we will be researching and hopefully adding to our services in the near future.

@mattcutts

Would you mind changing this:

The best actions for you from our perspective can be one of a couple options. Either contact whoever put up webpage B and convince them to modify or to take the page down. Or if the page is doing something against the law, get a court to agree with you and force webpage B to be removed or changed. We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.” Our policies outside the U.S. might be different; I’m not as familiar with how legal stuff works outside the U.S.

to a link to our site? All that stuff is great advice but it never hurts to give them one more option.

Thanks!