The expression “multimedia” still has the whiff of leisure about it – the once exciting idea that entertainment can be delivered to us in various active forms for us to watch and listen to.

A great deal of much more prosaic stuff is, however, recorded in multiple media formats. Almost any organisation these days warns you at the start of a telephone call that what you say may be recorded “for training purposes”. CCTV cameras owned and controlled by authorities, business organisations and individuals capture our every move and may be used against (or, indeed, for) us in criminal and civil proceedings. Social media gives us the opportunity to lay down a trail of our own movements as well as following those of others.

All these and many other kinds of non-text data sources are potentially discoverable. They may fall within the scope of our duty to disclose or, just as significantly, may contain the evidence which wins or loses cases for us. How and where will you find these files, and how will you review them?

I am taking part in a webinar with eDiscovery software provider iCONECT and hosted by ACEDS on Thursday 14 September at 1:00pm EDT. With me will be Ian Campbell, CEO of iCONECT and Robert DeBord, Director of Hosted Solutions at New Jersey Legal. Registration details are here.

Our aim is to discuss the significance of multimedia data in discovery for litigation, for regulatory purposes and for investigations, and to help foster an understanding of where such data lurks, how it is retrieved and how best to review it. Among other things, we will discuss how to:

• Ensure potential evidence is included in your data set
• Identify non-conventional sources of discoverable data
• Include specialised technologies to protect admissibility
• Maintain your proven workflows while incorporating new data types.

“I don’t have such cases” people may say. That may be true, but may also suggest (given the prevalence of such data) that they have not thought enough about the range of data with may exist. It is also important to know how you would deal with it if it came along. Not the least of the issues is that the resulting files can be very large, both in terms of file size and running time. Once it took at least an hour to review an hour of audio or video data. Now clever software tools enable you to get to the parts which actually matter and to mark them for subsequent review.

iCONECT is good at this, with tools within iCONECT-XERA designed to make it easy to find and mark passages in multi-media – I wrote about that last year in an article called Discovery of video and audio: Ian Campbell demonstrates with iCONECT-XERA:

Video analysis in iCONECT-XERA

ACEDS, the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists, puts up a constant flow of resources like this. You will find other examples, and more information about ACEDS, here.

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