Court allows injunction sent via Twitter

A law firm has been given permission to serve an injunction on a defendant via twitter, in what may be a legal first.

A client of SGH Martineau’s education team had ejected an undesirable far-right group from one of its campuses and sought an injunction against them trespassing on the university’s land again. However, they faced the problem of how to serve the papers since the group was not a recognised political group with offices or an organised infrastructure and mainly used social media to organise their activities. Therefore, they asked if they could use Twitter.

James Fownes, property disputes solicitor at SGH Martineau, says: “Interestingly the judge demonstrated a real understanding of the problems of the digital, virtual world. He not only granted our request to serve papers via Twitter, but granted a further injunction against one of the defendants which compelled him to procure that the group’s (offshore) web hosting company posted the original injunction on the group’s website. This interesting twist ensured we actually served two different injunctions”