Employment law attorney, blogger, and social media expert Molly DiBianca has written a series of blog posts of “LinkedIn Lessons for Employers.” She notes that employers often see LinkedIn as the “good son” of the social media world since it has practical workplace uses and doesn’t offer the distractions of Facebook. Here are the highlights of her discussion about three employment-law cases in which LinkedIn has played a substantive role.

1. Integrated Enterprise:  Will the Real Employer Please Stand Up?

In Freire v. Keystone Title Settlement Services, the plaintiff sued her former employer, alleging unlawful harassment and discrimination. The employer argued, among other things, that it did not employ the minimum number of employees to subject it to liability under Title VII. The plaintiff countered that the employer and its parent company operated as an integrated enterprise and, together, did employ the required minimum number of employees.

As evidence of the integrated nature of the two entities, the plaintiff introduced the LinkedIn profile of her former supervisor, which stated that the supervisor was employed by the parent company. The defendant countered with an affidavit by the supervisor, which stated that the supervisor had mistakenly used the wrong company name as her employer and that she had completed that portion of her LinkedIn profile before the relevant period.

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2. Successor Liability

In Steinberg v. Young, the plaintiff had alleged breach of his employment contract. The claim went to arbitration and the plaintiff won. When he tried to collect on the judgment, though, he claimed that the defendant—the owner or majority shareholder of several corporate entities, including the one that had lost in arbitration—had been fraudulently transferring assets out of the various entities to defeat the plaintiff’s collection efforts.

The plaintiff pursued a claim in federal court on the basis of the state’s fraudulent-conveyances law and under a theory of successor liability. On the successor-liability claim, the court found that there was evidence to support that the defendant was the “mere continuation” of one of the corporate entities. In denying the defendant’s motion for summary judgment, the court looked to the LinkedIn profiles of at least five employees of the original company who had continued with the successor company.

3. Agency Relationship

In Park W. Galleries, Inc. v. Hochman, the defendant filed a counter-claim against the plaintiff-art gallery, alleging that an individual, acting on behalf of the gallery, posted defamatory statements about the gallery on his blog.  In response, the art gallery argued that there was no evidence to show that the individuals who made the statements were acting on the gallery’s behalf.  The gallery’s CEO testified that individual was not and had never been an agent or employee of the gallery and that the gallery had never authorized the individual to speak on its behalf.

The test to determine whether there is an agency relationship such that an entity may be held liable for an individual’s actions or statements is whether the principal has a right to control the actions of the agent.  Under Michigan law, if there is any evidence to support the existence of an agency relationship, the question cannot be decided by the court but, instead, must be presented to the jury.

The court determined that there was sufficient evidence to support the existence of an agency relationship between one of the individuals when he made the allegedly defamatory statement.  The evidence cited by the court was a posting on the individual’s LinkedIn profile, on which he had identified himself as a “Consultant/Writer at Park West Gallery.”  In the “Experience” section of his profile, his profile included experience as a “Public Relations/Blogger/Writer” for the gallery.  And, according to the gallery’s website, the individual was editing a book to celebrate the gallery’s 40th anniversary.

Based on this evidence, the court concluded that the individual could have been speaking on behalf at the behest of the gallery when he posted the allegedly defamatory statements on his blog.

Tune in Friday to find out what you should do when you find a former employee’s LinkedIn account has wrong information about her time with your company.

– Molly DiBianca

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Learn more about LinkedIn at the July 14 webinar LinkedIn as Employee Reference Tool: How to Overcome Privacy, Liability, and Discrimination Challenges