Extract from Ariyah Mandel’s article “Best Practices for Handling Special Files in E-discovery: Audio/Video”
Over the years, e-discovery technology and best practices have focused on improving processing of standard documents like word processing files, emails and spreadsheets. “Special” or different files—like audio/video, texts in foreign languages, short message data and, more recently, proprietary applications—have been left behind, slowing the processing and reviewing of these files and thus entire e-discovery projects. More recently, specialized technology has been developed and improved to handle these files, as have workflows to take advantage of the platforms available.
In this series of articles, I will focus on the four most common of these special file types—which are becoming less special by the day—and discuss the options for technology and most effective workflows that can be seamlessly integrated into existing e-discovery processes and thus reduce the time and money spent on e-discovery.
Audio/Video Files
Media files of all kinds, including audio and video, are showing up in e-discovery more frequently every day. Legal professionals are feeling overburdened by the potential hardship these files may bring because they anticipate having to listen to or watch hundreds of hours of tape, if not more, in order to find and analyze the relevant passages.
Tactics exist to streamline the workflow for locating, sorting and examining audio and video materials for e-discovery; thus their anxieties are mainly unfounded. Currently, there are artificial intelligence tools like Veritone that enable legal practitioners to search both the structured data surrounding the files and the audio and video files themselves to locate words that were spoken and pinpoint images.
