THE SHAWN LEE REPORT · EPISODE 4

What’s Actually in the Parenting App’s Terms

Hosts: Meg (Stand With Meg) and Shawn Lee (criminal attorney)

This transcript has been edited for reading. Timestamps, pauses, false starts, filler words, and off-camera production talk have been removed. [Break] marks a spot where recording stopped or production talk was cut, and [unclear] marks words the audio doesn’t support. Speaker labels were added by an editor.

General legal education, not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created by this content. Shawn’s fraud framework is his theory, his professional reading of federal statutes. Opinions and allegations are presented as spoken; including them here does not establish a fact or a legal finding.

Source note from the supplied editor: Edited from the recording’s transcript in the Word document and checked line by line against the published video’s captions.

MEG: Welcome to the Stand With Meg Show. I’m your host, Meg, and I’m here with Shawn Lee from The Shawn Lee Report. We are so excited to have you. Hello, Shawn! What are we going to learn about today?

SHAWN: Today we’re going to learn about family court social media.

MEG: Oh, that’s a big topic. Oh my goodness. Let’s dive in.

SHAWN: All right, Meg, I want to do what we call a demonstrative exhibit. I want to demonstrate social media and technology and the impact they have. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to send you a text message, just like we’re interacting through a parent portal.

MEG: Okay. So you’re the dad and I’m the mom.

SHAWN: Yeah. I want you to read it, but don’t comment.

MEG: Okay.

SHAWN: All right. Sent you a text message.

MEG: (reading) “Meg, you dirty, rotten scoundrel. We should turn your chickens into fried chicken with gravy and the eggs into omelets…” Are you jealous of my chickens?

SHAWN: So look at this text message. I’m calling you a scoundrel, and I’m threatening your chickens. I want to eat your chickens.

MEG: I actually had a neighbor do that once. They said, “If you don’t move your chickens, we’re going to have chicken soup for dinner.”

SHAWN: Now I want you to imagine that two lawyers, a guardian ad litem, a therapist, and a psychologist read that, and what the bill would be.

MEG: Oh, good point.

SHAWN: Here we are in person. If I tell you I think you’re a scoundrel and I want to eat your chickens, we laugh, because we’re two human beings. But if that went through a court-ordered portal, it would be a thousand-dollar message. Because everybody would, number one, bill to read it, and number two, bill to talk to each other about what they read. All of which would be wires.

Wire number one was the message I sent. Wire number two was the message being transmitted to the attorneys, GALs, therapists, and psychologists. Wire number three is the attorneys, GALs, therapists, and psychologists communicating with each other about the first wire.

MEG: Wow.

SHAWN: Now let’s go back to our definitions: 18 U.S.C. § 1346 and 18 U.S.C. § 1349. Scheme and artifice to defraud. It’s a very broad definition.

MEG: It is.

SHAWN: It leaves so much open to interpretation. How does this benefit co-parents?

MEG: It doesn’t.

SHAWN: Right. It makes a bunch of people a bunch of money, and that’s where we’re going today.

MEG: Can I read what it says? (reading) “The term ‘scheme or artifice to defraud’ includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” What does “artifice” mean?

SHAWN: Artificial. Fake.

MEG: Fake. A scheme or fake. Okay, now we know what that means, people.

SHAWN: So if you have a scheme whose purpose is to draw you deeper and deeper into debt, that’s a scheme. You’re trying to purchase honest services, and you’re not getting them.

MEG: Wow. So all of these people who have gone completely bankrupt… this would be classified as that?

SHAWN: Potentially, if anybody were to ask me. Well, it depends. Let’s say I ran for attorney general. My plan might be to go after some of these schemes and artifices to defraud. And I think that’s the conversation we need to have nationwide right now: should people have their entire lives destroyed just because they went to family court?

Now let’s talk about social media. What do you think social media is?

MEG: To me, it’s communication between people. It’s almost like keeping up with what’s going on.

SHAWN: Social media, noun: “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).”

MEG: Oh, what is this? That’s cool. I’ve never even thought about what social media is.

SHAWN: Webster’s dictionary.

MEG: That is so cool. I love that.

SHAWN: Now let me ask you a question. I want your opinion. Do you think a court-ordered parenting portal is a form of social media?

MEG: No.

SHAWN: Look at the definition.

MEG: But it’s not a community. It’s not networking. Well… it’s online. “Communities to share information, ideas, messages, and other content.” Yeah, I guess. But it’s not live. Only the people you okay to come in can see it.

SHAWN: Do you see anywhere in there where it says “private”?

MEG: No, it’s not in the definition.

SHAWN: That’s because these court-ordered parenting applications are social media.

MEG: Wait a second. So you’re saying they’re mandating us to pay a lot of money for these little apps online, and it’s social media?

SHAWN: What can you do with these apps? You can post photos, post videos, make calls, have video calls, send messages, comment on all of the above, send bills. And you can do it all virtually, with a bunch of people you may never even see in real life.

MEG: On the internet.

SHAWN: That’s social media. These are social media companies. You are being ordered to pay companies that will admit they are social media.

MEG: Where’s my little light bulb? Does anyone have a lamp? Because that’s another one.

SHAWN: Let’s go into some of this. I printed off the documentation for the most popular companies here locally. One is the Terms for Professionals for OurFamilyWizard. Will you take a look at that for me?

MEG: (reading) “Terms for Professionals. The OurFamilyWizard website and mobile application (together, the ‘Software’) are… operated by OurFamilyWizard (‘we,’ ‘us,’ or ‘our’)…”

SHAWN: That’s the legal professionals’ contract. Attorneys have a different contract than users do. Let me show you a couple of key provisions. Under “Services, Fees, and Agreements,” a professional account can purchase coupons to give to their clients. If you’re a professional, you can move people onto these apps so you can bill more, and you can pay the company for coupons to get people onto the social media platform. It’s right here in the terms. They admit it: “You may purchase Parent Account coupons in volume from us at a discount to the Parent Account subscription prices.” So the attorneys are paying the company the judge is ordering you to use.

MEG: Wow. Not to mention it’s about $100 a year.

SHAWN: Now let’s go into the next portion. They’re all using artificial intelligence. This is their artificial intelligence disclaimer.

MEG: Don’t they scan what you’re saying? I haven’t been on one for a year or two now, because my kids were taken, but I used to be on it all the time. They scan what you say and tell you if it’s mean or not.

SHAWN: Yeah. They are using it, and this is how you get flagged as high-conflict: by the artificial intelligence.

MEG: You just opened my mind up to how much data this company has.

SHAWN: Yep. And you have to buy more data. A family generates an enormous amount of data, and historically that data was free. We met in person. In certain circumstances where there was a legitimate physical safety risk, people would meet at the police department, under the police department’s cameras.

MEG: Right. My ex and I, before all this came out, had our own emails just for the kids. It was just mine and his, and we communicated through that.

SHAWN: And it was free. Now you’ve got to buy their data. Now you’re being ordered by a judge to buy their data. And remember the Luzerne County court: the judge had a financial relationship with the company he was ordering children to go to.

Now look at this. This is a message I came into possession of. Look what the AI did.

MEG: (reading) “OFW, which is OurFamilyWizard, is a flawed and dangerous social media application that drives up division and artificially inflates legal fees and vitriol.” What is vitriol?

SHAWN: Vitriol is hate, division, anger. Take the text I sent you. Somebody who doesn’t know us and didn’t see our interaction could look at it and think, “Oh my gosh, he’s calling her a scoundrel and threatening to eat her chickens.” But we’re in the studio. We’re laughing.

MEG: Right.

SHAWN: OFW flags it as negative, and family court professionals can flag it as negative. Look what it did to that message: negative. The artificial intelligence flags any criticism of itself. So if you criticize these apps, these apps will label you as high-conflict. And once you are labeled high-conflict, you’re the problem. Bing, bing, bing. Money, money, money. Once you start to call attention to fraud, you are labeled high-conflict by a robot and a company with a financial conflict of interest.

MEG: And did you guys know that OurFamilyWizard actually sponsors the AFCC? They have ads in there. They sponsor the conference where all the attorneys and judges and therapists meet. They’re part of it.

SHAWN: Yes. And it’s all wires, 100% wires from bottom to top. You’ll never get a piece of paper from this company.

MEG: This kind of blows my mind, because we get in trouble if we put anything on social media. We can’t put anything on Facebook or anywhere, but we’re already putting it on social media. Technically, the order says we can’t put anything on social media, but we are putting it on social media.

SHAWN: Let me show you something. See this?

MEG: (reading) “Welcome to the profession, Spring 2026. Congratulations to the 70 individuals who passed the February 2026 Missouri bar exam and have completed all other requirements under Rule 8 for admission to The Missouri Bar.”

SHAWN: All of the names on that list have yet to be poisoned. All those people are fresh lawyers. Some of these family court cases have run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. For a relative pittance, you go find one of these people fresh from law school. You say, “Here’s the fraud I think is going on.” You give them a few thousand dollars, which will probably cover their apartment for the next three months, and they go put together something brilliant, because that’s what we do in law school. We try to teach people to be brilliant and to take on blatant problems in our judicial system.

MEG: Not to mention it brings these new attorneys a lot more clients, and all of a sudden it pushes out the old ones who are abusing the system.

SHAWN: Right. That’s historically how it works. The newer generation comes in, and if people are abusing the system, the new generation takes their client base and drives them out. People who are fed up with the system as it is can hire fresh lawyers with fresh bar licenses and a fresh point of view. Some of them are victims of the fraudulent system themselves.

MEG: You blow my mind.

SHAWN: Look, I’ve got TalkingParents here too. I want you to look at how thick these are. Do these look like thin waivers, terms, and fee agreements for these two social media companies?

MEG: No.

SHAWN: These are thick. Why? Because people are being injured, and they want to limit their liability.

MEG: I’m going to have to read that. Because could we report on them?

SHAWN: Yeah, absolutely. I showed you the case involving Judges Ciavarella and Conahan. PA Child Care LLC was a company those lawyers and those judges had relationships with. Follow the money.

You’ve got an order from a court ordering parents to use these companies. Now you have terms and agreements showing that lawyers are paying these companies for their services. You’ve got national conventions sponsored by these companies. And you’ve got thousands upon thousands of victims saying, “We are the victims of fraud.” And these are social media companies.

MEG: So I need to add a question to our survey about whether you’re mandated to communicate through OurFamilyWizard…

SHAWN: Right. A parenting portal.

MEG: A parenting portal. I’m going to update our survey with that question, because then we can see how many parents in each state have to use a social media portal. That would be great for the states to see, and for the FBI to see. All you have to do is go back into the survey, click “update my survey,” go to that question, and answer it. I’ll probably also add an option for which app it is. So please go update your survey right now, and tell us if the court has mandated that you use an app from a social media company.

SHAWN: Absolutely. Now, here’s why we know those apps are dangerous. This is the jury verdict form for State of New Mexico v. Meta.

MEG: And we know Meta: Facebook, Instagram.

SHAWN: The New Mexico Department of Justice filed suit against Meta for injuries to children. This is the flagship social media company. Look at how thick the complaint is.

MEG: Wow.

SHAWN: This is the complaint the New Mexico Department of Justice and its attorney general filed against this social media company. This was just this March. It’s 224 pages long.

MEG: So it’s still going? They’re still suing them?

SHAWN: No, this is the jury verdict. Look here. They were found liable for 37,500 willful violations of the Unfair or Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

MEG: Thirty-seven… not money, 37 violations?

SHAWN: 37,500 violations. Each violation carried a potential penalty of between $0 and $5,000, and they assessed the maximum on all 37,500 violations: $5,000 each.

MEG: Holy moly. That’s a lot of money.

SHAWN: Do you know what this proves? That all these victims of family court may be able to go after these social media companies for what they’ve done.

MEG: So what you’re saying is people can go tell law enforcement, because this was…

SHAWN: That’s the New Mexico Department of Justice. They went after Meta after seeing everything it was doing. The families, the victims, complained so much to law enforcement and to the attorney general’s office that the attorney general’s office filed a landmark complaint to hold Meta liable for the injuries to children. And they did it. They succeeded.

So if you are a victim anywhere in the country, and your life was turned upside down by lawyers, judges, therapists, or psychologists with inappropriate financial relationships with a social media company, you could potentially win big.

MEG: This is pretty cool. Can people find this on their own? Can we put this up?

SHAWN: I’m providing it to you. I’ll give you all of my research. This is in our fraud research file.

MEG: Because this is really cool to look at. It talks about children, [unclear], tailoring the feed to different children’s ages, and getting children to stay on.

SHAWN: The thing about social media companies is that they’re not confronted with the damage they cause. These companies running these apps advertise that they’re helping families and cutting down on division. There’s no evidence of that. There’s zero evidence of that.

In this particular case, the attorney general filed this complaint. Meta fought it all the way to trial and said, “Look, we didn’t do any of this. We’re not liable. We’re not doing anything wrong.” And a jury came back and said, “Yes, you are. You’re doing exactly what the attorney general’s office accused you of doing, and we’re going to hold you liable for it.”

MEG: So who got the money? Did everyone who complained get it?

SHAWN: They still haven’t gotten the money, because Meta has tried to appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rejected it.

MEG: What’s 37,500 times 5,000? (checks phone) That’s $187.5 million.

SHAWN: With interest. It’s accruing interest.

MEG: And who gets the money?

SHAWN: It’ll be distributed to the victims who filed reports of violations.

MEG: Some of these kids killed themselves.

SHAWN: Yeah. They destroyed their entire lives. So that’s the trend in the law right now. You have companies standing up portals, and what they basically say is, “Look, we can’t be held liable for what you do with our portal. We offer a portal, we market our portal, we advertise our portal, we sponsor conferences, and we allow people with vested financial interests to get our portal and pay for our portal. But we’re not responsible for what you do with our portal system.”

MEG: And then on top of that, we’re mandated to use these family portals…

SHAWN: And they’re basically brand-new companies. They didn’t exist that long ago.

MEG: No. When I first started going through my divorce in 2013, there was one we used just for a little bit. It wasn’t Family Wizard. It was something else.

So give me an example, using the court actors we introduced in episode two, of two parents talking and what it would look like. That way, when people see it, they’ll know someone did something wrong. An example with OurFamilyWizard, and how we would tell and report it.

SHAWN: Sure. So look here. This is Judge Conahan, coming out of federal court after his indictment. None of it could have worked without Judge Conahan. The Kids for Cash scandal in Pennsylvania relied entirely on his robe, his gavel, his courtroom, his discretion. And he couldn’t plead ignorance, because all the evidence was there.

But let’s look at our friendly tele-guardian ad litem. See this person? Without these applications, they couldn’t work remotely, sitting back in their office with zero relationships with anybody, including their clients. It wouldn’t be possible. They’d have to drive places, schedule appointments, have conferences. They’d have to do real work. So these people’s jobs, the way they’re done now, only exist because of these portals.

MEG: Right.

SHAWN: Now let’s look at our attorneys here…

MEG: But how do we report it? How do we put this into the complaint we’re doing? I’m trying to make sure everyone understands this, because I don’t even understand it. So you’d write, “This GAL did this. Never saw the person in person, never did this, only talked through OurFamilyWizard,” and you write that down?

SHAWN: Basically. When I showed you how to audit the bills, what you look for is the words “TalkingParents” or “OFW” in the bills. So let’s say the attorney emailed about it, like “You need to use this, why haven’t you used it,” or billed you for going in and reading it. That would be part of what you put in.

MEG: Right, okay.

SHAWN: Now, say you were having private communications with your significant other or anybody else. Say I texted, “Meg, you dirty scoundrel, I want to eat your chickens and make an omelet,” and no one saw it but me and you. That doesn’t cost any money, and we can get that out. We can laugh about it. We can meet up later if we choose. It’s free. But with these social media companies, because the communications are compromised, a whole team of people can bill on it. And that’s when you can get the real criminals involved.

MEG: So how does it work when a judge mandates it, though? Aren’t they covered because the judge ordered it?

SHAWN: Well, let me show you this. Here’s Mom’s attorney, and this is Dad’s attorney. We know Cersei Lannister and Robert Baratheon are a big hot mess. We’ve seen the shows. They’re up to a lot. Nevertheless, under our Constitution, they get a reasonably priced divorce, a reasonably long divorce, and a reasonably non-vitriolic divorce. In short, it can only cost so much, take so long, and be so bad and still be due process, even though they’re hot messes.

But that’s where you find people like this. Saul Goodman is a terribly unethical attorney. He commits crimes. Billy Flynn specializes in helping women who murdered their husbands portray themselves as something else. That’s where they take false information in these portal systems and pump it up, pumping something that should be a two into a three. They bill to email each other. They bill to forward the communications to the psychologist, to the therapist, to the judge.

There’s what actually happened, and then there’s how bad it becomes once it starts floating around social media. And that’s what the attorney general of New Mexico tried to illustrate: social media is a tool that can be terribly misused, and social media companies have a vested financial interest in their products being misused.

MEG: Wow.

SHAWN: If this didn’t make anybody money, they wouldn’t do it.

MEG: That’s insane.

SHAWN: Now let’s talk about our good court-ordered psychologist. Dr. Lecter has an absolutely pristine résumé. He went to Harvard, I believe, if I remember the books correctly. He had a thriving medical practice, he’d been published, and he was considered top of his field. There’s a reason the FBI consults with Dr. Lecter.

So Dr. Lecter is going to review all these social media posts. In fact, Saul Goodman and Billy Flynn are counting on it. They’re sending copies of the court-ordered social media posts to Dr. Lecter, and Dr. Lecter is rendering opinions based on social media posts. To refute Dr. Lecter’s opinion, you have to hire a counter-expert to come in, look at the same posts, and render an opposing opinion. What that does is artificially inflate legal rates.

That’s why I keep coming back to law enforcement. We introduced our friendly neighborhood law enforcement officers. There’s no legacy organization dedicated to this type of legal fraud. Part of the reason this can happen is that there’s no long-standing unit with its finger on the pulse, the way a gang unit has. This is new. And where you’re going to find a disparity is that law enforcement is going to miss it at first. The officers who keep missing it are going to stand out next to the ones who start to pick up that this is a brand-new scheme, these are brand-new bad actors, and this is a brand-new type of crime they need to investigate.

MEG: My brain is going a mile a minute just thinking about my own case.

SHAWN: Well, here’s what I will tell you. There’s generally one story going on. People all over the country, both the ones who won their case and the ones who lost it, agree that it took too long, it cost too much, and there was way too much anger and division. That’s something all the parties can agree on: nobody really won.

So that is the definition of social media. You didn’t think to yourself that you were talking on social media.

MEG: No. I can’t wait to make a video about this and talk about it.

SHAWN: So look, I’m going to take you back to our new virtual courts. These are all arising out of judicial orders. The legislature didn’t pass a law mandating parent portals. These are judges using their discretion. So from an appellate standpoint, we need to be arguing abuse of judicial discretion and judicial error. We need to be looking for financial conflicts of interest. More importantly, if there are financial conflicts of interest, and say we can prove a single penny went to a judge in any form or fashion from one of these things and it resulted in a ruling, that district is going to face years of litigation. Because, as I said, lawyers are cannibalistic. If we smell millions of dollars and a lawyer or a judge who has violated the law, somebody will go after them.

[Break]

MEG: So what if Cersei is in court, and all of a sudden the judge cancels her trial because she didn’t pay GAL fees? Wouldn’t that be classified as a violation?

SHAWN: I think there’s a motion they file. I want to say it’s called a Staples motion, but I could be wrong. Long story short, there’s case law out there that says if a GAL is appointed and you don’t pay them, the court can retaliate by striking your answer.

MEG: Right. But there are even people going to jail right now because they couldn’t afford to pay attorney fees. How is that possible? You don’t even go to jail for not paying your credit card, or for going bankrupt.

SHAWN: You raise a really interesting constitutional question. How much of this is unconstitutional detention? You’re being ordered to go into a portal system and log everything there. You have people being ordered to go to these therapy companies, then ordered to go to these supervision companies, and they’ve committed no crime. That raises Eighth Amendment questions in my mind.

MEG: Correct. I just posted a reel about that the other day. What other court, what other anything in life, can literally take everything, look into every part of your life, even take your DNA, when you haven’t committed a single crime?

SHAWN: Family court has a lot of challenges, and that’s why family court is so difficult to practice.

Let’s talk about Cersei Lannister. Cersei Lannister, by all accounts, is a psychopath. She has murdered countless people or had countless people murdered. Conspiracy to commit rape is something she did. She cooperated with people to commit a horrific crime. The crimes she has committed are terrible. So from a family court perspective, she is a risk. The court needs the discretion and the tools to protect the co-parent, the children, and society. Now, with that being said, Cersei gets due process. They’ve got to go through…

MEG: But she didn’t get due process. She had to pay the reunification therapist. She had to pay another therapist. She had to get psych evaluations. She had to get drug tests, hair tests, everything, and she still didn’t get a trial.

SHAWN: That can be a constitutional issue. Nearly every state I’m aware of has its own constitution with its own bill of rights. I haven’t read every single one. In Kansas, you have a constitutional right to a jury trial. And federally, you have a right to a trial. So these are constitutional questions.

MEG: But who watches over the Constitution?

SHAWN: Lawyers are supposed to.

MEG: But who makes sure it’s actually happening?

SHAWN: Well, there’s the problem. We have a system of checks and balances.

MEG: Don’t we have an organization (not the FBI, of course) that monitors the Constitution? Some kind of task force that makes sure our agencies and our people are following it?

SHAWN: There are several different avenues. Number one is hiring lawyers. There’s no way to fight a lawyer except with a lawyer. Number two, there are bar associations for ethical issues. There are law enforcement agencies to investigate municipal, state, and federal crimes. And then there’s the court of appeals.

Now, what I find interesting is that sometimes lawyers won’t preserve issues for the court of appeals, because they don’t want anyone looking into it. I’m kind of a hard charger in criminal court. I will not hesitate to file a motion calling attention to even the slightest legitimate violation of my client’s rights. I don’t care what kind of crime my client is accused of. If I think their constitutional rights are being violated, I’ll file the motion.

What I’m seeing in some of the cases referred to me are lawyers who are pulling punches. They’re not filing motions. They’re not preserving objections at the trial court level. And that takes away the court of appeals’ ability to weigh in. You go to the court of appeals and say, “What was done to me was terribly unconstitutional,” and the court of appeals says, “I’m sorry, but your trial lawyer didn’t raise that issue at the district court level. We can’t do anything for you.” So from an appellate standpoint, you’ve got to get it on file in the trial court. And if your lawyer is unwilling to file it… [unclear]

MEG: Right. And I think that’s one thing people don’t realize. When you go to the appellate court, they only look at what was filed in the lower court, in your family court. So if it wasn’t filed there, they can’t look at it.

SHAWN: Right. And this is a good segue into what you really want to know. So much of people’s understanding of family court is based entirely on wires.

[Break]

SHAWN: Meg, I want you to take a look at this. I made it specially for public dissemination.

MEG: Oh, yay! You made this! If you don’t know, Shawn is very, very intelligent. I don’t know if you guys know what a memorandum is. A memorandum is basically the facts of the law, correct? It’s like Shawn saying…

SHAWN: Yeah. “I’m writing down what the law is. That’s my position, and I’m sticking to it.”

MEG: Okay. So he wrote one about social media.

SHAWN: So look, Meg, here’s what I want to talk about: wires. We keep coming back to wires: wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, racketeering based on conspiracy to commit wire fraud. So much of the law now runs entirely through wires because of these virtual court orders. People’s entire understanding of reality is based on whatever they last saw on their smartphone. That can make people believe things that are 100% bogus, and in some cases, lawyers bank on that.

A legal memorandum is supposed to be a written document that counsels a person on the law. So many of these families have dumped $50,000, $100,000 into their cases. And what have they gotten for it? A series of text messages, calls, emails, and video conferences, with no written document explaining to them what the law is, where the law stems from, where the law is going, and an opinion on the law. That’s a legal memorandum.

MEG: So, as Shawn’s been teaching us, we’re building a way for you to learn this, the kit. It’s called the legal federal kit that we’re putting together. We haven’t decided exactly how to do it yet, but Shawn and I are working on a way for you to take this information, put it with your own case, and write up your own complaint to file. And this is another one, so now I have memorandum one and two. We haven’t shared the other memorandum yet, but I did put together my own federal complaint using his memorandum. This new one is about social media. So subscribe. We’ll start posting more, and we’re going to talk about more on our lives for subscribers on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. We’re still building a way for you guys to do this yourselves, and a way for us to stay alive, because it costs a lot of money to keep this all going.

[Break]

SHAWN: I’m going to zip through this. Meg, you remember our presidentially declared emergency?

MEG: Yes.

SHAWN: Well, that can trigger heightened penalties for wire fraud. And then there’s November 16, 2020: our new virtual courts, with our virtual lawyers, our virtual doctors, and our virtual therapists.

This is a memo on how social media has been incorporated into all of this. Social media is “forms of electronic communication, such as websites for social networking and microblogging, through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content, such as videos.” There is nothing in there about the information having to be public to meet the definition of social media.

So, legal social media. Your lawyers are using social media: Clio, MyCase, Checkbox, CARET, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters. Whenever you log into your lawyer’s case software to upload information, you’re participating in legal social media. And as we’ve learned, nobody’s verifying whether the stuff that floats around social media is true or accurate. That raises the risk of legal error, especially when you’ve got people like Cersei and Robert Baratheon who are motivated to go at each other, and people like the attorneys in our case who are financially motivated to let them, because it raises their own fees. There’s no evidence these software companies are trying to reduce legal fees. It’s all about increasing legal fees. They’re subscription services.

Let’s talk about tele-doctors. Every state has passed telemedicine laws. So now you can put information into the parenting app, you can put information into your lawyer’s social media database, your lawyer can file information through the court’s e-filing system and hold a video conference based on all of this, and a tele-doctor can render an opinion based on all of that. Do you hear any problems?

Now let’s go into the tele-courts, more legal social media. The courts are using social media. Our e-filing systems are social media. Lawyers can file from just about anywhere. They can log in and post information. Whether that information is true or accurate is open to interpretation. Usually we’re there because somebody filed false information and we need a trial to sort it out. So the courts are operating social media.

Let’s talk about our tele-prosecutors. Prosecutors’ offices are using social media. You have remote-working prosecutors. They’re not in the office. Their paralegals and their assistants aren’t in the office. They have case management software, and they’re not interacting with the police. They’re just sitting back in their little apartments, looking at their email inboxes, e-filing things based on people they don’t know, facts they don’t know, and evidence they haven’t seen.

Now let’s talk about tele-social workers: DCF, Missouri’s Children’s Division. They get a mix of legal and medical social media. They’re filing in the courts’ e-filing systems. They’re attending court by video conference. They’re in the Microsoft meetings. But they’re also interacting with telemedicine companies, hospitals, and children’s service companies. So they’re getting a mix of social media from law and from medicine.

MEG: Wow.

SHAWN: And then you have tele-police, which is what it sounds like: remote-working police. They’re not interviewing witnesses in person. They’re not verifying facts. They’re taking things at face value. They look at Evidence.com and Axon.com, they form an opinion, they make a few calls, and they file the case.

Here’s something interesting about Kansas. Kansas just passed a video preliminary hearing statute. So now you can sit on your couch and provide probable cause for a felony in video court, thanks to the new video law in Kansas.

And finally, there’s school social media. A lot of what ends up in our legal social media comes from school social media companies. So your average parent goes through the family court process, and now they have logins for something like 15 different portals: education, administrative, medical, and legal. And that’s what drives up the legal fees, because somebody is filing false information. Sometimes it’s both parents, sometimes lawyers, sometimes doctors. And it is so much easier and faster to spread false information than it is to rebut it.

MEG: Yeah. So that’s social media. Thank you for watching the Stand With Meg Show with The Shawn Lee Report. See you next time. Stand with Meg.