Facebook used for serving legal documents

by Stevie Smith - Dec 17 2008, 17:32

Striking out from its role of promoting community interaction and the gathering of friends, social networking phenomenon Facebook has this week been used as an approved delivery method for serving legal documentation.

Specifically, Facebook has been used to officially notify an Australian couple that their home is being repossessed after the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that lawyers are permitted to serve such papers via the online network. 

According to lawyers representing mortgage company MKM Capital, repeated attempts to serve Carmela Corbo and Gordon Poyse with repossession notification had failed before it was later discovered they had moved from the address initially served and also changed their phone number.

When the hiring of a private investigator also failed to garner any positive results regarding the couple’s whereabouts, the mortgage company’s legal team then turned to the courts and Facebook as a possible last ditch solution.

By using Facebook to search out the couple’s individual public profiles, the lawyers used the displayed dates of birth and linked e-mail addresses to convince judge David Harper that the profiles did indeed belong to Corbo and Poyse.

Following the rules laid down by default judgments, defendants that fail to appear in court and are labelled as untraceable are then open to alternative methodology such as e-mail when it comes to discovering their location and delivering documentation.

With the approval of the court, MKM’s legal team promptly dispatched the outstanding repossession notice via a Facebook private message unseen by public visitors.

Perhaps unsurprisingly considering the couple’s apparent intent to remain at large, both of their public profiles have since disappeared from view on the network, reports the National Post.

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