Extract from Kelly Twigger’s article “#CaseoftheWeek Episode 143: Social Media Pseudonyms and eDiscovery: Lessons from OpenAI Litigation”
In Episode 143, Kelly Twigger reviews the need to plan for social media accounts where parties use pseudonyms and the specificity required to show relevance for discovery requests, as well as contemplating whether we may finally have a decision implicating data from a generative AI tool.
Introduction
Welcome to this week’s episode of our Case of the Week series brought to you by eDiscovery Assistant in partnership with ACEDS. My name is Kelly Twigger. I am the CEO and founder at eDiscovery Assistant, your GPS for ediscovery knowledge and education. Thanks so much for joining me today.
One announcement before we get started. I am working with the Midwest Chapters of ACEDS on a four-part series on ESI protocols. There are four webinars in total. The first two have already aired, but are available to stream here. The third installment will be a judges panel moderated by my good friend David Horrigan on June 6th, and I’ll be hosting a workshop on ESI protocols in July. You can use the link to sign up for more details and view the previous sessions.
Each week on the Case of the Week I choose a recent decision in ediscovery and talk to you about the practical applications of that case and what you need to be thinking about as you conduct discovery of ESI.
Let’s dive into this week’s case, which comes to us from the very high profile In re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation. This decision is from May 2, 2024 and authored by United States Magistrate Judge Robert Illman. The issue tags for today’s decision are Failure to Produce, Possession Custody Control, and Social Media. This is a relatively short opinion, but an important one for a couple of reasons: it involves one of the first discussions of the generative AI tool ChatGPT and we are all anxiously awaiting discovery case law on this issue, and it allows for the discovery of the identities behind social media accounts using pseudonyms.
