Nick Himonidis was the featured speaker at American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers Fall 2017 CLE Program “Crimes & Misdemeanors” – presenting a CLE program entitled “Spousal espionage – Drawing the line between legitimate, lawful self-help in gathering digital evidence and unlawful / criminal conduct.”

Program summary

The collection and use of digital evidence (ESI) has become a key component in all forms of modern litigation – including matrimonial and custody litigation. Email, text messages, social media and other forms of ESI can be critically important with respect to the location and value of marital assets, claims of marital waste, and custody issues. There is clearly an emerging trend of clients who insist on engaging in ‘self-help’ to collect what they perceive to be important digital evidence – outside the scope of formal discovery (perhaps before the case is even commenced). Some of this conduct may be lawful, and may result in valuable and potentially admissible evidence, but some of it is clearly unlawful and may violate multiple New York state and federal criminal statutes, and if so, other statues may render such evidence inadmissible.

This program will cover the legal (and ethical) boundaries between lawful collection of ESI on the one hand, and the unlawful methods of doing so, which appear to be have become an all too common reality.