Video turns up twice in this short story, once as the subject of an interview and once as the medium by which the interview is given.

Let’s take the presentation medium first. What we have here is Bill Hamilton of the University of Florida eDiscovery Project talking to Ian Campbell, President and CEO of eDiscovery review company iCONECT.

The interview is apparently conducted over Skype or something similar so you can see both of the participants. It includes a short desktop demonstration of relevant iCONECT-XERA functions by Ian Campbell.

Full marks from me for the low-cost way of distributing helpful information to a wide audience.

As to the content, the subject is the need to give discovery of video, audio and other multimedia sources. As Ian Campbell points out, an ever-increasing amount of information is now captured in video and audio form, and a video or audio file is as potentially discoverable / disclosable as any other form of document.

The point Ian Campbell makes is that one needs to be able to review such documents in the same way as one reviews more traditional documents. The files have inherent metadata such as the date, time, and length or size, and one needs to be able to add information such as the names of people involved in the recording, what it is about and what issues it relates to. It needs to be easy for reviewers to code in a way which allows them to refer others, not just to the source itself but to relevant sections in it.

iCONECT-XERA does this very well – you can read about about its new multimedia features here. Ian Campbell demonstrates this with a short video; he pauses the video on a scene and makes a comment on what is happening at that point; he then sends a link to the file, with the comment, to another reviewer who can go straight to the matter of interest. The comment remains there throughout the course of the review, perhaps supplemented by other comments, and accorded the same level of importance and ease of accessibility as, say, a paragraph in an email.

The same applies, Ian Campbell says, to audio. He shows that it is easy to identify passages where there is silence (in this case at the beginning of the meeting before anybody turns up); that can be excluded from review to save everyone’s time thereafter. A witness might say that the really important bit of a discussion was between 30 and 40 minutes into the meeting, and this can be highlighted and drawn to the attention of others.

Full marks, then, both to iCONECT for the tools and to Ian Campbell and Bill Hamilton for this extremely neat way of giving a demonstration.

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