A few weeks ago, I moderated a webinar presented jointly by iCONECT and ACEDS called Did you see that?… how video / audio are changing the way we win cases.

The presenters were Ian Campbell, CEO of iCONECT, and Rob DeBord, Director of Hosting Solutions at New Jersey Legal. Mary Mack of ACEDS did the the introductions.

Our theme was that vast amounts of multimedia, non-text data is created every day by governments, law enforcement, businesses and medical organisations. Individuals like you and me also create our own pictures and videos on phones and tablets. All of this is potentially discoverable, and the purpose of the webinar was to share some ideas on how to identify, capture, review and produce it.

The first issue to be addressed is remembering to ask clients and opponents if there is any potentially discoverable data of this kind. It needs to be collected properly without altering the metadata. It raises major issues, not least of space. It potentially requires significant resources to review it and to identify the parts of the output which are relevant to the issues. Not the least of the difficulties lies in the need to remove privileged and private information, as well as to ensure that the result is admissible in a court.

iCONECT-XERA is particularly good at this, and Ian Campbell used it as a model for showing what can be done. An example is XERA’s ability to allow the reviewer to skip over silent periods in an audio recording and go straight to the passages where someone is actually speaking. XERA allows reviewers to tag specific parts of a recording and to redact passages which should not be disclosed.

The output is available above. It is a quick way of getting up to speed on this increasingly important subject.

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