What We Missed: Court Approves Serving Notices Via Facebook

It seems that in Canberra, the capital city of Australia, court notices served through email and text messages are valid. Recently, the Supreme Court approved the use of Facebook to serve people:

Lawyers Meyer Vandenberg, acting for lending company MKM Capital, applied to Master David Harper of the Supreme Court last week to use the popular internet site to serve notice of a judgment on two borrowers who had defaulted on a loan.
Carmel Rita Corbo and Gordon Kingsley Maxwell Poyser failed to keep up the repayments on $150,000 they borrowed from MKM last year to refinance the mortgage on their Kambah townhouse.

This development isn’t as revolutionary as it sounds; the Supreme Court judge only granted approval after the lender’s lawyers showed that conventional methods of serving notices had failed; paying for a newspaper ad and private investigators, as well as looking for the lendees at their respective homes produced no results.
In other words, I’m pretty sure that the judge felt that there was no other choice. normal circumstances probably wouldn’t have seen approval for serving notices on Facebook. Observers might express surprise that the Australian legal system is willing to trust that two accounts on Facebook do represent the real Ms. Corbo and Mr. Poyser. But again, the reliance on a social networking website is based on sound reasoning by the lender’s legal team:

“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.
This information was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants.

By striving for a perfect balance between conventional legal procedure and the need to adapt to the situation, the Australian judge has proven his wisdom. It would be a waste, after all, to discount the so-called new things, especially when the old way of doing things has proven unsuccessful. The legal team that successfully gained approval for the Facebook court notice also deserve credit, as its approach to solving its clients problem was very creative and flexible.

(image from federalcourtclerks.com)