Text Messaging, Facebook Can Get You in Legal Trouble

How we miss the quaint times when text was just a quick way to chat with buddies. Today, these fleeting missives, now integral to so many work lives, amount to a multimillion-dollar corporate risk. Organizations sit largely unprepared while text messages replace e-mail as the digital smoking gun.

You know how it goes: On mobile devices, employees peck out details of their private lives, remarks about colleagues and, inadvertently or not, confidential business information. Things people would never say out loud or in memos fly around in text, often memorialized in digital archives that you don't control. It's juice for a legal adversary.

Text messages about employee firings and extramarital sex recently brought down Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty.

Last year, three police officers sued the city and the mayor for wrongful termination, claiming they were whistle-blowers who had been retaliated against for discussing possible misconduct in Kilpatrick's administration. During the case, Beatty testified that one officer, Gary Brown, "was not fired." But text messages subpoenaed from SkyTel, which provides pagers to the city, said otherwise.

"I'm sorry that we are going through this mess because of a decision that we made to fire Gary Brown," read one of Beatty's texts to Kilpatrick, with whom, as other messages revealed, she was having an affair.

The officers won the case and $8 million. The city executives lost their jobs; Beatty resigned in January and Kilpatrick in September. In October, Kilpatrick was sentenced to four months' jail time.

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