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Chris works for Autonomy Corporation - the innovative leader behind meaning-based computing.

Friday, May 6, 2011

E-discovery and Social Media

I was just reading through this post over at Drug and Device Law and there seems to be no shortage on how people are approaching Social Media. Lawyers (and their 3rd party affiliates) are friending people on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn to gain access to potentially relevant information. Everyone is trying to find their footing in this whole new playground of evidence. Of particular interest to me is how people can now download all of their information on Facebook and the increase in rich media as a result:
Another thing that potentially makes plaintiff e-discovery easier – at least from Facebook – is the recent addition of an option by which a user can download to a “zip” file all the material, whether text, videos, or photos, that a user (presumably the plaintiff) has ever placed on his/her page. 
This has now opened a new portion of e-discovery - that which can emphasize photographic and video evidence as much as traditional text. 300 million people are on Facebook - and they are on there to share photos and videos. E-discovery will need methods to efficiently cull this data without wasting a lawyer's time (imagine being in the office watching videos of a lifetime's worth of vacations).

Indexing pictures/video is a difficult process and relies on some antique methods of tagging - think how YouTube relies on user categorization. This can lead to significant inaccuracies. Something I've seen recently from Autonomy is the ability to use pattern-matching technologies to build an understanding of content within pictures - a more advanced version of how Facebook suggests tags now in their photo section. The really interesting application of this technology comes in video. Autonomy can use pattern recognition to determine who is in a video - and can do so in real time! E-discovery can not only be reactive, but in-house counsel can now use the same technology to ensure they are litigation ready.

Check out more details from Autonomy here, better yet feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn here.

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