Involved in a lawsuit? Be ready to welcome the world into your life.

One of the downsides of engaging in litigation, even on behalf of a righteous cause, is the way in which you must open much you consider private not only to your adversary but often also to the public.  Your motives, your finances, your personal relationships, and, in certain circumstances, your physical and emotional health will be subject to inquiry in the course of a lawsuit.  Often, these questions and answers will be part of the public record.  Court records, after all, are public records.

Fortunately, unless you are considered newsworthy, most of the public will not go rooting through court files.  It is inevitable, though, that the new technologies and media outlets will be used to exploit the exposure of personal matters.

So I am not surprised that, as reported in the ABA Journal, “Outraged by deposition testimony in a fraud suit against a Houston automobile dealership, a client of a Texas attorney arranged, with the lawyer’s help, to post a six-minute excerpt on YouTube.”

In this case, the judge ordered the post taken down (because the deposition was not yet part of the public record in the case), but he refused to sanction the lawyer and client who had initially posted it. “However, the final salvo hasn’t yet been fired in battle to publish the deposition excerpt on YouTube. [The plaintiff's attorney] plans to file a written transcript of the deposition at the courthouse, as part of the record in the case, and then post the full deposition on the site. Under those circumstances, says [the defense lawyer] . . . , his client would be unlikely to protest.”