Legal papers served via Facebook

Status update: You're sued.

Legal authorities said Tuesday that a High Court judge in England has approved the use of Facebook to serve legal claims.

Lawyers in a commercial dispute were granted permission last week to serve a suit against a defendant via the popular social networking site.

Justice Nigel Teare permitted the unconventional method of service during a pretrial hearing into a case that pits two investment managers against a brokerage firm they accuse of overcharging them.

A former trader and an ex-broker, Fabio De Biase and Anjam Ahmad, are also alleged to have been in on the scam.

Jenni Jenkins, who represents Ahmad, said lawyers in the case had been trying to track De Biase in order to serve him with legal documents. She said that a copy of the suit was left at his last known address, but that it wasn't clear whether he was still living there.

The lawyers didn't have his email address, so they applied for permission to send him the claim through Facebook.

Jenkins, an associate with London-based law firm Memery Crystal, said the lawyers were confident that de Biase's account was still active.

De Biase was given extra time to respond to the claim "to allow for the possibility that he wasn't accessing his account regularly," she said.

Ordinarily, British legal claims are served in hard copy -- either in person, by mail, or by fax -- although unconventional means are occasionally employed if the people involved are hard to pin down.

Facebook did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.