Tag Archives: social media evidence

October 4, 2022 · 9:49 AM

Flawed Collection Methods Prevent TAR and Other Applications of Analytics on Social Media Evidence

By John Patzakis

Every litigator and eDiscovery practitioner is aware of the critical importance of analytics as a tool to support their cases. AI-driven analytics supercharges compliance investigations, data security, privacy audits, and Technology Assisted Review (TAR) of documents, emails, social media and other web-based items. AI machine learning employs mathematical models to assess enormous datasets to gain deep insights into key information. This enables the identification of discrete and hidden patterns in thousands of emails, social media posts and other electronic files to categorize and cluster documents by concepts, content, or topic.

However, it is important to understand that such a powerful capability requires the extracted text and metadata of the subject documents, emails and social media posts. So when examiners resort to screenshots, including flat file PDF image captures, this prevents the use of game-changing analytics in your case. Screenshots do not natively preserve the subject text or metadata and are useless if fed into analytics engines. This is a major disconnect with many eDiscovery practitioners who may not fully understand that by utilizing print screen, they are forfeiting their clients’ ability to utilize otherwise game-changing analytics on the social media and other web-based data they are collecting.

Bobby Malhotra, eDiscovery team co-lead at Munger Tolles highlighted this point in a recent webinar addressing the importance of native file collection for social media evidence: “If you are on a matter that is going to be very data intensive in terms of collecting voluminous amounts of data from social media sites, and you are going to need to mine through that data to understand what happened and get the relevant context (with an AI engine) the only way to really do that is to collect the full text and metadata, and so, screenshots will not suffice.” Malhotra emphasized that this is a “really critical point regarding the analytics process as a lot of people don’t think about that.”

In fact, not only will screenshots omit text and metadata, the screenshot will create a false record if introduced into the review and analytics workflow as the metadata of the screenshot itself will be completely different that the metadata of the original native object. For these reasons, it is important under an attorney’s duty of competency related to eDiscovery technology, to understand the implications of not collecting social media and web based evidence in native format, and strongly consider utilizing best practices technology to properly collect and preserve this critical source of evidence.

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February 27, 2020 · 9:09 AM

X1 Integrates Social Media and Web Evidence Collections into Relativity

By John Patzakis

As succinctly noted by The Florida Bar Association in its publication, Florida Law Journal: “Social media is everywhere. Nearly everyone uses it. Litigants who understand social media–and its benefits and limitations–can immeasurably help their clients resolve disputes…it is inevitable that the social media accounts of at least one person involved in a dispute will have potentially relevant and discoverable information.“ “Social Media Evidence: What You Can’t Use Won’t Help You” Florida Law Journal, Volume 88, No. 1.

For this reason, X1 announced at Legalweek in New York the integration of its industry-leading X1 Social Discovery technology into the RelativityOne and Relativity server platforms. This development comes three months after X1’s recent announcement of an integration of X1 Distributed Discovery into Relativity via the Relativity Collect interface. X1 now provides integrated and streamlined ESI collection, now including both enterprise and social media data, for all Relativity users, 75 percent of which are Fortune 500 companies.

For social media and web-based evidence, X1’s Social Discovery now displays collected data natively in Relativity. This enables social media and website content, including complex evidence like photos, videos, comments, “likes,” emojis, and linked content, to be displayed and reviewed in Relativity in its native format. X1 delivered this in response to strong demand from the hundreds of organizations that rely on both Relativity and X1 Social Discovery for their daily eDiscovery needs.

As you can see from the screenshot below, this integration is slick. It provides a rich, native view of social media data in the Relativity interface, all normalized so that the X1 Social data can be reviewed and analyzed alongside all other ESI in Relativity. This enables social media and internet-based data to be reviewed in the cloud by teams of reviewers at once, with all the power and collaboration that the Relativity platform has to offer.

social screenshot rel

What sets the X1 Social Discovery/Relativity integration apart is twofold. First, X1 Social performs the data collection in an automated yet very detailed and sophisticated manner. X1 collects all the fields individually, including several dozen metadata fields unique to social media platforms and also to websites. This robust and detailed X1 Social collection capability enables the data to be effectively ported, displayed (in a rich view), searched and analyzed in Relativity. X1 Social is not simply taking a glorified screen shot and converting that to a flat PDF. X1 is collecting each post, each photo, and each video, comment etc., as individual items with all their associated metadata. This is the key to maintaining context, parent-child relationships, defensibility and meaningful review and analysis.

The other key component is the integration plug-in for Relativity. This plug-in enables the viewer for all X1 Social evidence ingested on an automated basis to enable a rich, native display. This integration maps all the correct fields per social media data source, as Twitter will have different metadata fields than Facebook, or YouTube, or websites, etc. It also preserves the parent-child relationships between the various social media items such as comments, photos, replies, comments, emojis, etc., and also maps to correct views and viewers that will natively display those items. None of this is possible with a simple screenshot flat file collection, which is what the other inferior tools provide.

“X1 is a key partner and collaborator for our customers with dynamic eDiscovery needs,” said Drew Deitch, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Relativity. “It’s a major benefit to clients for us to be able to offer a streamlined, end-to-end data collection experience with the ability to dynamically find, analyze, collect and review all kinds of data. We are excited to continue collaborating with X1 moving forward.”

X1 is also excited to continue the collaboration to streamline the data import from enterprise and web-based data sources straight into Relativity. This integration with X1 Social Discovery and Relativity is a key part of that effort.

We recently featured the X1 Social and Relativity integration with an online briefing and live demo. You can access a recording of the briefing via this link.

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Filed under Best Practices, eDiscovery, eDiscovery & Compliance, ESI, Relativity, Social Media Investigations, Social Media Metadata

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September 27, 2016 · 10:02 AM

LTN: Social Media Evidence Even More Important than email and “Every Litigator” Needs to Address It

legaltech-news-thumbBrent Burney, a top eDiscovery tech writer of Legaltech News, recently penned a detailed product review of X1 Social Discovery after his extensive testing of the software. (Social Media: A Different Type of E-Discovery Collection, Legaltech News, September 2016). The verdict on X1 Social Discovery is glowing, but more on that in bit. Burney also provides very remarkable general commentary on how social media and other web-based evidence is essential for every litigation matter, noting that “email does not hold a flicker of a candle to what people post, state, admit and display in social media.” In emphasizing the critical importance of social media and other web-based evidence, Burney notes that addressing this evidentiary treasure trove is essential for all types and sizes of litigation matters.

Consistent to that point, there is a clear dramatic increase in legal and compliance cases involving social media evidence. Top global law firm Gibson Dunn recently reported that “the use of social media continues to proliferate in business and social contexts, and that its importance is increasing in litigation, the number of cases focusing on the discovery of social media continued to skyrocket.” Undoubtedly, this is  why Burney declares that “every litigator should include (X1 Social Discovery) in their technical tool belt,” and that X1 Social Discovery is “necessary for the smallest domestic issue all the way up to the largest civil litigation matter.” Burney bases his opinion on both the critical importance of social media evidence, and his verdict on the effectiveness of X1 Social Discovery, which he lauds as featuring an interface that “is impressive and logical” and providing “the ideal method” to address social media evidence for court purposes.

From a legal commentary standpoint, two relevant implications of the LTN article stand out. First, the article represents important peer review, publication and validation of X1 Social Discovery under the Daubert Standard, which includes those factors, among others, as a framework for judges to determine whether scientific or other technical evidence is admissible in federal court.

Secondly, this article reinforces the view of numerous legal experts and key Bar Association ethics opinions, asserting that a lawyer’s duty of competence requires addressing social media evidence. New Hampshire Bar Association’s oft cited ethics opinion states that lawyers “have a general duty to be aware of social media as a source of potentially useful information in litigation, to be competent to obtain that information directly or through an agent, and to know how to make effective use of that information in litigation.” The New York State Bar similarly weighed in noting that “A lawyer has a duty to understand the benefits and risks and ethical implications associated with social media, including its use as a … means to research and investigate matters.” And the America Bar Association recently published Comment [8] to Model Rule 1.1, which provides that a lawyer “should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.”

The broader point in Burney’s article is that X1 Social Discovery is enabling technology that provides the requisite feasibility for law firms, consultants, and other practitioners to transition from just talking about social media discovery to establishing it as a standard practice.  With the right software, social media collections for eDiscovery matters and law enforcement investigations can be performed in a very scalable, efficient and highly accurate process. Instead of requiring hours to manually review and collect a public Facebook account, X1 Social Discovery can collect all the data in minutes into an instantly searchable and reviewable format.

So as with any form of digital investigation, feasibility (as well as professional competence) often depends on utilizing the right technology for the job.  As law firms, law enforcement, eDiscovery service providers and private investigators all work social discovery investigations into standard operating procedures, it is critical that best practices technology is incorporated to get the job done. This important LTN review is an emphatic punctuation of this necessity.

 

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January 22, 2014 · 1:00 PM

The Benghazi ESI Scandal

Last week, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan report finding that the deadly assault on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 other Americans, could have been prevented.

Bengazi

The account spreads blame among the State Department, the military and U.S. intelligence for missing what now seem like obvious warning signs in the weeks before the September 11, 2012, attack, including multiple clues and outright threats that appeared on social media — key evidentiary source of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) as defined by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

And therein lies what could be the real scandal of the Benghazi affair – The failure of the US Intelligence Committee to monitor and investigate available social media evidence leading up to the attack in that volatile and dangerous part of the world.  The Senate report notes that “[a]lthough the Intelligence Community (IC) relied heavily on open source press reports in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the IC conducted little analysis of open source extremist-affiliated social media prior to and immediately after the attacks.” And that there were “reports from the IC indicating that more in-depth intelligence exploitation of social media in the Benghazi area, including web postings by Libyan nationals employed at the Temporary Mission Facility, could have flagged potential security threats to the Mission facility or important information about the employees prior to the September 11, 2012, attacks.”

One of the missed clues identified by the Senate report, which includes 14 independent references to social media evidence, involved a prior May 22, 2012, attack on the Benghazi-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) building by militants with Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs). On May 28, 2012, a previously unknown organization, The Omar Abdurrahman Group, took to social media to claim responsibility for the ICRC attack and issued a direct threat against the United States. It is believed by many intelligence experts, and implied in the Senate report, that the Omar Abdurrahman group was responsible for the September 11, 2012, attacks on the American diplomatic compound.

The Senate report includes a key recommendation that the Intelligence Community “must place a greater emphasis on collecting intelligence and open-source information, including extremist-affiliated social media, to improve its ability to provide tactical warnings…” And separately, the Senate Intelligence Committee recommends that the “IC should expand its capabilities to conduct analysis of open source information including extremist-affiliated social media particularly in areas where it is hard to develop human intelligence or there has been recent political upheaval. Analysis of extremist-affiliated social media should be more clearly integrated into analytic products, when appropriate.”

Ironically, all these pieces of evidence and clues could have been very effectively gathered with specially designed investigation software that runs $945 a seat.

And speaking of written reports issued last week by prominent organizations that address the compelling trend of social media evidence, Gibson Dunn released their 2013 Year-End Electronic Discovery and Information Law Update. In a section dedicated to social media, the Gibson Dunn Update notes that “the number of cases involving social media evidence continues to skyrocket,” and that “Commentators and courts alike have noted that the use of social media evidence has become commonplace across all types of litigation.” The Update covers several cases, many of which have been addressed on this blog, involving key legal issues related to social media. It’s a good read, and is not unlike the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Benghazi report, in that both underscore the critical importance of social media evidence, for both reactive and proactive investigations of many stripes.

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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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