Blogs and trials have been a recent confluence.  Dr. Flee, who blogged his own trial was one [well reported by the New York Personal Injury blog of Eric Turkowitz.

Now, jurors are coming into the mix.  Law.com editor and blogger Robert J. Ambrogi suggests that the failure to root out and research these bloggers could be legal malpractice.

"As blogger Matthew Wheeler sat in a Milwaukee courthouse this week for jury duty, he amused himself with Twitter postings such as "Still sitting for jury duty crap. Hating it immensely. Plz don’t pick me, plz don’t pick me," and "More like Jury DEpreciation Month! So this is Purgatory, eh." Unfortunately for Wheeler, he did get picked for what the <i>Milwaukee Journal Sentinel</i>’s Proof and Hearsay blog describes as "the mother of all trials" — a six-week lead-paint injury case. But at least the lawyers in the courtroom knew of Wheeler’s blog and Twitter postings before he was selected. Circuit Court Judge Richard Sankovitz had decided at the outset to ask all potential jurors, "Do you blog?"

Then there is the Chicagoland blogger known only as Erin, who posted earlier this month that "somebody actually put me on a jury" and "i can’t wait to decide the lives and deaths of men tomorrow." After Robert W. Kelley wrote about her at his Florida Jury Selection Blog, she answered back with a post captioned, dear members of the florida bar: welcome to my shitty blog. Kelley said that Erin’s blog was pointed out to him by jury consultant Amy Singer, who wrote, "This blog post illustrates the necessity of online searching venire panelists for information."

These two recent examples of blogging jurors demonstrate that there is no longer any question of the need for lawyers to ask potential jurors if they are writing online, says another jury consultant, Anne Reed, writing at her blog Deliberations. The question now, she says, is not whether to ask, but how. "There are nearly countless ways a juror could be writing on line," she explains. "You need some sense of the landscape to ask about them, or you’ll get partial answers or answers you don’t understand." To that end, she offers the first in what she says will be a multipart guide for lawyers to the world of social networking.

As for Erin, her perspective on all this may be the most prescient. Acknowledging the to-do over blogging jurors, she comments:

"okay i didn’t write my thesis on psychometrics or anything (yes i did) but i bet if you dismissed every potential juror with some type of internet presence you would end up with range restriction galore. EVERYBODY UNDER THIRTY IS ON THE INTERNET. those are my peers." "