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Finance And Economics
Manufacturing Industry
Entertainment And Media
Finance And Economics
Manufacturing Industry
Entertainment And Media
How to effectively evaluate the relevance of audio and video files in a case
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our increasingly virtual world. With this change comes an increase in data volumes. According to reports , Zoom conference participants surged from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020. Although some in-person meetings have resumed, meeting recordings and other media files are increasingly valued in evidence disclosure. This means that all investigations require multiple technologies to address the unique challenges posed by media files.
New technologies are making comprehensive disclosure reviews more efficient and helping to reduce time, lower costs and improve efficiency.
As the workplace becomes increasingly hybrid and distributed, data collected from collaboration tools that incorporate audio and video calling technology, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, will become increasingly important in legal proceedings. Recent cases include a defamation lawsuit between Arrow Translations and a well-known brand and another legal dispute. Both cases showed the importance of multimedia evidence in supporting their respective cases. In each case, the disclosure process included enhanced transcription capabilities to capture and search text. These are good examples of social media data collection, while there are also cases where organizations retain multimedia recordings in accordance with government regulations.
Financial institutions doing business in the United States are subject to the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires them to record all calls to increase accountability and transparency; similar requirements are enforced in the United Kingdom by the Financial Conduct Authority. These calls often contain a large amount of information that must be collated when a dispute, investigation or subject access request arises.
In one case against a Midwestern manufacturer, hundreds of audio and video files were collected showing the installation of the organization’s products in the field. In this case, the issues centered on defective installation by the manufacturer and maintenance lapses by the Department of Transportation. Over 1,500 hours of media files were collected and processed, and after reviewing them with advanced transcription technology, less than 10 hours were ultimately determined to be relevant. Without this technology, the organization would have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars reviewing each video one by one in real time.
Multimedia files present unique challenges in e-discovery because they are processed differently than standard email or Word files and require different techniques to search. Before the use of these technologies, lawyers reviewing media documents would have spent the same amount of time as the recording, plus additional time listening again. Editing often requires temporarily withholding complete media recordings or investing significant time in editing audio and media into segments and black-boxing confidential or personally identifiable information. Even so, this requires processing every frame of recording.
Leveraging advanced transcription tools alleviates many past challenges, turning manual processes into automated ones and reducing human error. These tools can search audio by keywords, edit specific words or phrases by removing sounds from a certain period of time, and identify and remove personally identifiable information from videos, including facial features. As a result, the use of these tools has increased significantly.
We live in a virtual world - your legal proceedings and investigations have media documents. Reviewing these documents in real time is a tedious task, but it should not be ignored. If multimedia content is not fully evaluated or incorporated into the review process, the disclosure process is prone to delays and may be incomplete.
If your investigation, arbitration, litigation, or project includes media files, consider taking advantage of these advanced machine transcription tools. But be aware that not all tools are created equal, and haphazardly dragging and dropping media files into a free transcription program may undermine any privilege or confidentiality of that media.
