Service of Process via Facebook
Australian attorneys can now serve enforceable court documents by posting them on a defendant’s Facebook profile. An Australian Supreme Court judge ruled that lawyers could use the social networking site to serve court notices.
Email and SMS text messages via mobile phone have been used before to serve Australian court documents, but the Aussie attorneys who won the ruling are claiming process service by a social networking site, such as Facebook, is a world first.
Meyer Vandenberg, lawyers acting on behalf of lender MKM Capital, applied to Master David Harper of the Supreme Court last week to use Facebook to legally serve notice of a judgment on Carmel Rita Corbo and Gordon Kingsley Maxwell Poyser, borrowers who had defaulted on a $150,000 mortgage.
Meyer Vandenberg retained private investigators and process servers to serve the judgment on the couple and posted notice of the action in The Canberra Times, however after almost a dozen service attempts, attorneys for MKM Capital tried a different approach. Lawyers Mark McCormack and Jason Oliver convinced the court that Facebook profiles for the defendants were those of Ms. Corbo and Mr. Poyser. “The Facebook profiles showed the defendants’ dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,” a spokesman for the firm said.
The information available on their profiles was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a valid method of communicating with Corbo and Poyser.
“You’ve been ‘poked,’ now you’re homeless.” one Facebook pundit observed. The defendants have been successfully served in this matter.
Australian courts are regarded as being amongst the most technologically advanced in the world and this innovation goes to further that claim.
Service by email, fax, sms or via a social networking site would decimate the entire process serving business in the United States should US courts ever start accepting these methods as valid service.
[...] process via e-mail is not just gaining acceptance in Australia (read our previous article regarding serving process through Facebook). Now, several Virginia attorneys are hoping they will be able to convince a Federal District [...]
I think you will find that these examples were of Substituted Service where prior reasonable attempts had been made at personal service but could not be effected.
Rules for substituted service allow for such actions as publishing the documents in a local newspaper, service upon a relative, service upon a physical address etc (or some combination) as long as the Court is satisfied that the Respondents are likely to be aware of such.
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