Category Archives: Social Media Investigations

March 18, 2013 · 5:29 PM

Case Study: Social Media eDiscovery Services Delivered as SaaS

QuoteEditors Note: Today we have guest blogger, Brett Webber from Australia’s Sententia Discovery. Sententia has been breaking new ground in social media discovery by providing hosted instances of X1’s Social Discovery for its clients, including a major insurance company.  

At Sententia, we have demonstrated both the power of X1 Social Discovery (“X1SD”) coupled with an innovative SaaS delivery mechanism to maximize substantial return on investment for our clients. The hosted solution allows users to access X1SD using a standard web browser and reduces the time required for users to set-up and run cases. “It allows me and my team to focus on the investigation not on the technology” says Sententia customer Gary Coulthart from MCAA, one of Australia’s leading investigators. “With Sententia’s expertise in setting up the technology and configuring the social media data sources, I am getting more material faster.”

To date, our results have been impressive. Social media evidence collected by clients such as Gary have been used to resolve a number of cases related to insurance claims. The matters have included insurance relating to personal injury, income protection, workers compensation and medical insurance. “The actuarial reserves on many of these cases are six figure amounts, so any evidence we can collect to reduce fraud is very valuable. The ROI associated with this effort has been outstanding”.

The Sententia Group has been providing data centre services since 1989. Its clients include telecos, financial services institutions and government agencies. It has combined this data centre experience with a decade of electronic discovery expertise to create a straightforward user experience for social media discovery.

This offering requires infrastructure and expertise in application setup and hosting; by configuring and hosting X1SD at an enterprise standard, much of the complexity has been absorbed by Sententia. This enables law firms, enforcement agencies and corporate investigators to implement a global process in their social media discovery efforts. Sententia also provides ancillary but important s services such as case management, security and backup, which clients both need and expect. A number of clients have restrictive IT environments and need to host X1SD outside of their firewalls. Our SaaS solution meets those needs. But this offering would not be possible without  X1SD’s unique speed, scalability and ability to extract and preserve the material to an evidentiary standard.  Based upon our research, no other providers have the technology appropriate for social media discovery. We usually have new users up and running and effectively collecting material for new matters within an hour at a modest price per matter.

Table 1: Summarises a number of our client’s recent SaaS matters delivering strong return on investment:

Insurance Matters2Click image to enlarge

 

For more information visit SententiaDiscovery.com or contact us at +612 9994 2700 and mcaa.com.au +612 8003 3295

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February 21, 2013 · 1:35 PM

Live Social Media Evidence Capture from Today’s Vegas Strip Shooting

Unfortunately, a tragic event transpired this morning in Las Vegas leaving three people dead and at least three others injured after a shooting and fiery six-vehicle crash along the Strip. According to reports, at about 4:20 a.m. someone in an SUV opened fire into a Maserati that had stopped at a light. The Maserati moved into the intersection at Flamingo Road and collided with a taxi, starting a chain of crashes that involved four other vehicles. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

Given the criminal investigation and civil liability implications of this event, we wanted to demonstrate the new important capabilities of X1 Social Discovery to immediately identify, preserve and display geolocated Tweets (and often Instagram posts) at or near the scene immediately before, during and after the incident. X1 Social Discovery is now able to map a given location, such as a city block or even a full metropolitan area, and search the entire public Twitter feed to identify any geolocated tweets that have been made in the past three days (sometimes longer) within that designated area, as well as to capture any new tweets within that area going forward. As illustrated below, this capability is extremely useful for law enforcement, corporate security and civil litigators.

When we learned of the Vegas incident, we mapped the general area of the strip  and within seconds, all the recent Tweets from the past several hours were populated within the grid and collected within X1 Social Discovery.

Accident 4

From there, we were able to sort those tweets within the interface and identify some key Tweets made immediately after the incident, such as this post:

Accident 5

Accident 2

We are able to sort and identity the exact time (in GMT) of the posts in question as well as associated metadata.

Accident 3

Here is another post below. Both this example and the one above contain notable intel in the comments, suggesting the possible identity of one of the victims, as well as a reference to another posted picture on Instagram. This reflects the utility of X1 Social Discovery’s ability to collect not just the social media post, but the comments thereto in real-time.

Accident 1

This feature can also be employed proactively, to map an area around a school, an embassy, an oil drilling facility overseas, or other critical infrastructure assets to collect and store any geolocated tweets in real time. But of course in order to take full advantage of this ability to gather key evidence such as the evidence, posted above, you need to own the software at the time of the incident.

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February 5, 2013 · 9:24 AM

Social Media Discovery Hotter Than Predictive Coding?

fire isolated over black backgroundIt was a great show last week at LegalTech New York. Definitely an increase in the number and quality of attendees and it was nice to see many friends and colleagues both old and new.

Also very noticeable were the many, many vendors sporting predictive coding (aka technology assisted review) messaging in their respective booths and various forms of marketing material. In fact, one industry colleague pointed me to a recent bold prediction offered by Recommind lawyer Howard Sklar, essentially proclaiming that predictive coding will have really hit the big time when a state bar organization issues an ethics opinion stating “that failure to use predictive coding is ethically questionable, if not unethical.” Sklar goes on to predict that such an opinion will come within the next 18 months.

I don’t disagree that such a development would be a big deal. But my question is, why stop at an advisory ethics opinion? What about an actual published court opinion where a sitting appellate judge decrees, without mincing words, that legal ethics obligations require lawyers to employ predictive coding? Now that would be huge. Something, in fact, like Griffin v. State, 192 Md. App. 518, 535 (2010), which addresses another hot topic in eDiscovery:

“[I]t should now be a matter of professional competence for attorneys to take the time to investigate social networking sites.”

Now to be fair, I must point out that Griffin v. State was reversed and remanded on other grounds (419 Md. 343 (2011)), but I would argue the overall impact from an ethics and best practices standpoint is still there.

Sklar also points out three appellate level cases with written opinions that discuss the concept of predictive coding, without any definitive rulings compelling its use, but nonetheless discussing the concept. Two of the three are even retrievable on Westlaw. I think such appellate-level published decisions are important, which is why we highlight the several thousands of published court decisions in the past three years (see here and here) that have compelled the production of, admitted into evidence, or otherwise recognized the importance of social media evidence to the case at hand. New cases are being published every day, to the point where we candidly have stopped counting due to the deluge. So by the standard set by of my esteemed fellow eDiscovery lawyer Mr. Sklar, social media discovery is a very hot field indeed.

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January 24, 2013 · 1:36 PM

Social Media Geolocation Provides Critical Evidence – Including Admissible Hearsay

Nearly all new mobile devices not only feature geo-location but set its activation by default. Many of the most popular mobile apps are built around the premise of geo-location to help you navigate the streets, find new restaurants and other points of interest, and even find your friends, so more and more mobile users are enabling this function. As such, a significant number of social media posts made from a mobile device have geo-location coordinate metadata associated with them. The evidentiary value of such information cannot be understated.

For court purposes, the content of such Tweets may be admissible hearsay themselves even if the actual identity of the author of a Tweet is never ascertained.  Under Rule 803(3) of the Federal Rules of Evidence, “[a] statement of the declarant’s then existing state of mind, emotion, sensation, or physical condition . . . but not including a statement of memory or belief to prove the fact remembered or believed unless it relates to the execution, revocation, identification, or terms of declarant’s will” is not excluded by the hearsay rule. Rule 803(3) arguably describes the vast majority of Tweets, especially those from the likes of Paris Hilton or Charlie Sheen.

And then there is the “excited utterance” exception under Rule 803(2) which provides that, “[a] statement relating to a startling event or condition made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement caused by the event or condition” is not excluded by the hearsay rule. So, a Tweet stating “Oh my gosh, a big SUV just ran a light and nailed that Prius!!!!” would arguably fall under Rule 803(2).

To enable our user base to leverage this key evidence, this week we are announcing a major enhancement to X1 Social Discovery software that we believe significantly advances the ball for social media investigations. X1 Social Discovery will now be able to map a given location such as a city block or even a full metropolitan area, and search the entire public Twitter feed to identify any geo-located tweets that have been made in the past three days (sometimes longer) within that designated area, as well as to capture any new tweets within that area going forward. This capability is extremely useful for law enforcement, corporate security and civil litigators.

Below is an example of a geo-located area with X1 Social Discovery, with the highlighted, captured Tweet suggesting that the author could be a key witness to a traffic accident:

accident4

From there, an investigator can silently follow identified persons of interest in furtherance and highly efficient investigation. For law enforcement, this is obviously useful to gather facts and identify potential witnesses for various crime scenes. This feature can also be employed proactively, to map an area around a school, an embassy, an oil drilling facility overseas, or other critical infrastructure assets to collect and store any geo-located tweets in real time. But in order to take full advantage of this ability to gather key evidence, you need to own the software at the time of the incident.

This upgrade is part of our continuing innovation for X1 Social Discovery. We strongly believe that we have the top social media investigation tool on the market and this new feature only solidifies this position.

> To learn more, contact us for a demo or come visit us next week at Legal Tech New York, where we will be in booth #2012.

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December 14, 2012 · 9:12 AM

Round up of Recent Social Media Evidence News and Resources

For this week’s entry, we have a rundown of recent developments in the world of social media evidence from some reputable sources.

KL Gates Social Media Analysis. To start off, our  previous entry discussed the case of Richards v Hertz Corp., underscoring that any law firm defending or prosecuting personal injury claims, as well as their hired eDiscovery consultants, should be investigating social media sites for source evidence as a matter of course. The same is true for employment law matters and top 10 law firm K&L Gates (which has the best eDiscovery blog of any law firm in my opinion – eDiscoverylaw.com) has a great write-up of E.E.O.C. v. Original Honeybaked Ham Co. of Georgia, Inc, where social media evidence is playing a key role in that case, prompting the  court to issue a broad discovery order for social media. Again, nothing really new here – just further reinforcement of the standardization of social media evidence.

Law Review and Social Media Evidence. This year, several reputable law reviews and other legal treatises have published important and very useful research notes on social media evidence. These resources are subscription only for those with access to Westlaw, but the following are a select list with cites to the articles that I found most useful:

  1.  UNDERSTANDING AND AUTHENTICATING EVIDENCE FROM SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES, 7 Wash. J. L. Tech. & Arts 209, 224+
  2.  TIPS FOR AUTHENTICATING SOCIAL MEDIA EVIDENCE, 100 Ill. B.J. 482, 485
  3.  SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE RULES ON AUTHENTICATION, 43 U. Tol. L. Rev. 367, 405+
  4.  WHAT HAPPENS ON MYSPACE STAYS ON MYSPACE: AUTHENTICATION AND GRIFFIN V. STATE, 42 U. Balt. L.F. 164, 186
  5.  INTERNET, EMAIL AND SOCIAL MEDIA EVIDENCE, ST051 American Bar Association 51+

Netflix CEO in Hot Water with SEC over Facebook Post.  Netlix CEO Reed Hastings congratulated his team for a job well done in early July on his public Facebook page, and now the SEC is investigating whether he violated investor fair disclosure rules. His message was only 43 words, boasting of increased subscribership and usage of online videos, which could be construed as material non-public information related to financial reporting. This incident obviously highlights the importance of social media monitoring consisting of best practices as part of a corporate social media compliance program.

Search Compliance Interview with Barry Murphy: Finally, this article:  Q&A: Social media data collection increasingly vital to e-discovery is a good read. eDiscoveryJournal’s Barry Murphy is arguably the most knowledgeable independent industry analyst on social media evidence issues.

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