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December 17, 2008

Patrick Cormier

Australian Court Serves Documents via Facebook

So says Nick Abrahams in his similarly titled post of last week:

Today in what appears to be a first in Australia and perhaps the world, Master Harper of the ACT Supreme Court ordered that a default judgement could be served on defendants by notification on Facebook.

I wonder how long before this happens in Canada? After all, Canada is the country in the world with the highest Facebook penetration, as a percentage of its population… 29% in July 2008! Too bad Facebook doesn't send back read receipts to lawyers serving documents on Facebook.

Former Legal Counsel and project director at National Defence, Government of Canada. Currently heading Government 2.0 Think Tank Inc., specialized in providing consulting services to governments in how to advance their web 2.0 agenda. You can get in touch with me at patrick.cormier (at) g2tt.com
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One Comment on “Australian Court Serves Documents via Facebook”

  1. John G says:
    December 17, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    Why is this not just a new but not very surprising version of substitute service? The party seeking to serve via Facebook had gone to all sorts of trouble to find a real-world place to serve, including hiring a private investigator. The Facebook pages on which he wanted to post the document showed an email address that had been used on the original loan application (the default on which loan led to the judgment to be served).

    Would a Canadian court not be satisfied by that kind of activity and that kind of evidence of real possibility of coming to the attention of the party to be served?

    Is this really any different from the handful of cases in various jurisdictions (not yet Canada, so far as I know) permitting sub service by email?

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