A Real World Social Media Discovery Case Study From the Trenches

As mentioned in my last post, many law firms and eDiscovery service providers have in recent months extensively discussed social media discovery in a general fashion. Such dialogue is important and educational, but it is  great to see the innovative service firm D4 highlighting their major league, battle tested social media discovery capabilities by outlining a case study where they delivered a huge win for their clients.

D4, experts in computer forensics and eDiscovery consulting, recently tackled a case involving the capture of several dozen Facebook and LinkedIn accounts amounting to over 2 million items. Utilizing X1 Social Discovery, D4 rapidly collected and searched through these items to quickly pare down the item count to roughly 7,000. Once the social media data set was at 7,000 items, D4 exported the data into the review platform Relativity.

In addition to D4’s prowess, three critical factors served as game changers to allow for this exercise that would otherwise have been impossible without best practices technology. First, D4 was able to collect these 2 million items on a highly automated basis with X1 Social Discovery. If screen captures were used instead, it may literally take a year to capture that volume of data. Second, once captured those two million items were indexed at the point of collection and placed within a designated case to allowing for searching, sorting and analysis in a single interface and case-centric workflow. D4’s efforts reveal how X1’s workflow and patented fast-as-you type search enables very effective early case assessment for social media.

Finally, X1 Social Discovery’s unique ability to capture several dozens of metadata fields for social media was extremely important to the case. D4 states:

“We were able to take advantage of the metadata fields captured by D4 during the collection process…The attorneys were able to go through the posts in less than two days and found a dozen or more posts that were critical to the case. In my opinion, without using the tools and expertise offered by D4 they never would have found the evidence.”

We agree.

And on a related recent development, John Waters of Law Technology News published a review of X1 Social Discovery after his extensive testing, and the results are consistent with the scalable functionality leveraged by D4:

“In my tests, X1 (Social Discovery) was fast and responsive…The interface is clean and simple, with a logical layout. And the feature set is just about everything you could ask for as you dig into the burgeoning mounds of status updates, tweets, digital pictures, hash tags, comments, and links. I was impressed with X1’s ability to search globally across the public feeds of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn with the X1 Search engine’s fast-as-you-type feature. The product’s ability to scale makes it flexible enough to allow e-discovery pros to cope with a massive and rapidly expanding source of potential evidence.”

The broader point in both of these examples is that X1 Social Discovery is enabling technology that allows law firms, consultants, and other practitioners to transition from just talking about social media discovery to winning big league cases with cutting edge technology.