Tag Archives: X1 Social Discovery

June 19, 2012 · 7:00 AM

Case Study: The Importance of Integrated Social Media and Website Crawling Collection

One of the benefits of the very strong market adoption of our X1 Social Discovery software is that we receive a significant amount of invaluable and excellent customer feedback from very seasoned eDiscovery and law enforcement professionals. Many of these experts report that a good number of their social media investigation and collection cases also require general website collection. For instance, a person on Facebook promoting infringing technology may also be posting relevant information to industry web bulletin boards or maintaining their own website. It is thus important that a social media eDiscovery and investigation process feature integrated web collection and social media support.

For an effective process, website data should be collected, searched and reviewed alongside social media collections in the same interface. The collected website data should not be a mere image capture or pdf, but a full HTML (native file) collection, to ensure preservation of all metadata and other source information as well as to enable instant and full search and effective evidentiary authentication. All of the evidence should be searched with one pass, reviewed, tagged and, if needed, exported to an attorney review platform from a single workflow.

To illustrate what this looks like in the field, we recorded an 8 minute demonstration based in part upon a real life example reported to us by one of our customers. This case study, performed by our CTO Brent Botta, involves the collection of social media data as well as message board posts on the web. Importantly, this evidence is consolidated into a unified workflow to be searched in one single pass.

The investigation features X1 Social Discovery as the platform, which now features automated and integrated web crawling capabilities in addition to its renowned functionality for the collection and analysis of Facebook and Twitter content. We believe this is the only solution of its kind to collect website evidence both through a one-off capture or full crawling, including on a scheduled basis, and have that information instantly reviewable in native file format through a federated search that includes multiple pieces of social media and website evidence in a single case. Up to millions of web captures and social media items are searched instantly with the patented X1 search, tagged and exported from a single interface.

Like social media content, web pages bring their own unique but important challenges for evidentiary authentication. In the next week, we will be posting on best practices for the collection and authentication of web pages as evidence, so stay tuned!

Leave a comment

Filed under Best Practices, Preservation & Collection

Tagged as authentication, Brent Botta, Case Study, collection, customer feedback, demo, eDiscovery, evidence, Facebook, law enforcement, social media investigation, web collection, web crawling, website collection, website crawling, X1 Social Discovery

May 22, 2012 · 12:14 PM

Surging Wage and Hour Class Action Suits and the Importance of Social Media Evidence

Wage and hour class action suits are rising dramatically. According to the USA Today, Plaintiffs filed 7,006 federal court wage-and-hour suits in 2011, many of them class actions, nearly quadruple the 2000 total. Many of these suits involve claims of misclassifying employees as exempt from overtime, especially salespersons and temporary professional employees. Additionally, these claims involve allegations of non-exempt employees being required to work off hours through the use of mobile devices, webmail and social media. As such, social media evidence is playing an important role in the litigation of wage and hour claims on multiple levels.

As one recent example, a federal court in the Northern District of California earlier this month imposed monetary sanctions of nearly $16,000 and disqualified the lead plaintiff as the class representative in a wage and hour class action for failing to disclose relevant Facebook evidence. In Calvert v. Red Robin International, the lead plaintiff proved to be very active on Facebook, using the site to communicate with other claimants and to recruit potential plaintiffs into the class. The plaintiff and his lawyers failed to disclose this evidence, which the defendant’s law firm ultimately obtained through their own diligent investigation efforts. Such disqualifications and monetary sanctions against the lead plaintiff can prove to be important tactical victories in cases such as these.

Calvert is just one of many recent wage and hour cases that we have seen where social media has played a critical role. For instance, our customers have recently reported successfully using X1 Social Discovery in wage and hour claims, including, for example, to collect Linkedin and Facebook evidence that contradicted Plaintiffs claims that they were non-exempt employees. In addition to this customer use example and the case of Calvert v. Red Robin International, there are numerous other scenarios where the search and collection of social media evidence can be essential to the litigation of wage and hour cases, highlighting the importance of best practices technology to diligently represent your clients’ interests.

Leave a comment

Filed under Best Practices, Case Law

Tagged as best practice, Calvert v. Red Robin International, claims, employees required to work off hours, Facebook, Facebook evidence, federal court California, federal court wage-and-hour, investigation, lawyers, LinkedIn, litigation, mobile devices, monetary sanctions, Plaintiffs, social media, social media evidence, technology, USA Today, Wage and hour class action, webmail, X1 Social Discovery

March 8, 2012 · 9:02 AM

Jurors All “Atwitter”

Source: Federal Judicial Center

The Federal Judicial Center (“FJC”) recently published a report surveying 952 federal district court judges to identify the scope of jurors’ improper use of social media during trial and how the courts are addressing the problem. The FJC’s report, Jurors’ Use of Media During Trials and Deliberations, reflects that despite various prevention efforts, jurors continue to use Facebook, Twitter, Google and other sites in several, and that the courts continue to struggle to detect such usage. According to the survey results, 30 judges identified incidents of improper juror social media usage, but the results also reveal no established process for detection. Fellow jurors and the trial attorneys were the most common sources identifying a juror’s social media misconduct, suggesting that the problem is far more widespread given the absence of a clear detection mechanism. Upon learning of such improprieties, those judges either removed the juror, cautioned the juror, declared a mistrial, held the juror in contempt, fined the juror, or held a hearing to determine the scope and nature of information shared.

In our own limited research based upon published decisions only, we identified 11 cases in 2010 and 2011 reflecting alleged misconduct on the part of a juror, including Dimas-Martinez v. State (Ark. Supreme Court 2011) where the court overturned a death penalty conviction due in large part to a juror Tweeting about the case during trial. There are presumably many more such cases either not involving a published opinion or where the juror’s social media malfeasance went undetected. The other 10 cases that we readily know of are (with links):

Juror Number One v. State (Dist. Court, Calif. 2011)
People v. Turner (Calif. Appellate Court. 2011)
People v. Rios (NY Supreme Court 2010)
State v. VLG (La. Appellate Court. 2011)
US v. Forde (US Court of Appeals, 4^th Cir. 2011)
US v. Fumo (US Court of Appeals, 3^rd Cir. 2011)
US v. Ganias (Dist. Court, Conn. 2011)
US v. Juror Number One (Dist. Court, Penn. 2011)
People v. Lozano (Calif. Appellate Court. 2011)
State v. White (Ohio Apellate Court 2011)

In another case with an interesting twist, a Minnesota court considered a motion for mistrial after the prosecutor blogged about the case during trial on her public Facebook page. State v. Usee, (Minn. Appellate Court 2011). With no actual evidence that any of the jurors read those potentially prejudicial messages, the court denied the motion, but the incident highlights the importance of monitoring public social media use by opposing counsel and parties as well.

It is thus no surprise lawyers are increasingly using Twitter to investigate and monitor potential and impaneled jurors. However, this type of monitoring activity can lead to serious attorney ethics violations if direct or even indirect communications are sent to the juror as a result of such monitoring activities. (See e.g. New York County Law Association Formal Opinion No. 743, May 18, 2011). Proxies hired by attorneys, including eDiscovery service providers, investigators and jury consultants are subject to these restrictions, which can also apply to social media communications with witnesses or opposing parties who are represented by counsel.

For this reason, X1 Social Discovery features a specialized “public follow” feature that enables access to all the past Tweets of a specified user (up to 3200 past tweets) and any new Tweets in real-time without generating a formal “follow” request with the resulting problematic communication. This feature works within the public APIs provided by Twitter for third-party developers. And as Twitter has a full license to distribute all Tweets and make them publicly available per their terms and conditions, we believe this is the most proper method to obtain this information.

To illustrate this important feature, we published this 1 minute video clip. These legal ethics rules concerning indirect social media communications underscores the importance of employing best practices technology to search and collect social media evidence for investigative and eDiscovery purposes. Collecting evidence in a manner that prevents, or at minimum, does not require that attorneys and their proxies directly or indirectly communicate with the subjects from whom they are collecting social media evidence is a core requirement for solutions that truly address investigative and eDiscovery requirements for social media. In addition to preserving and authenticating social media evidence in a proper manner, X1 Social Discovery provides fast and comprehensive searching of the data in a manner unmatched by any other technology. It can even potentially prevent a possible mistrial through early detection of a juror’s improper Tweets or Facebook postings.

Leave a comment

Filed under Best Practices, Case Law

Tagged as Dimas-Martinez v. State (Ark. Supreme Court 2011), Facebook, Federal Judicial Center, FJC, Formal Opinion No. 743 May 18 2011), Google, Juror, Juror Number One v. State (Dist. Court Calif. 2011), Jurors’ Use of Media During Trials and Deliberations, People v. Lozano (Calif. Appellate Court. 2011), People v. Rios (NY Supreme Court 2010), People v. Turner (Calif. Appellate Court. 2011), Public Follow, social media, social media evidence, State v. Usee (Minn. Appellate Court 2011), State v. VLG (La. Appellate Court. 2011), State v. White (Ohio Apellate Court 2011), Tweeting, Twitter, US v. Forde (US Court of Appeals 4th Cir. 2011), US v. Juror Number One (Dist. Court Penn. 2011), X1 Discovery, X1 Social Discovery

February 22, 2012 · 3:51 PM

Tompkins v. Detroit Metropolitan Airport; the Importance of Systematic Public Search of Social Media Evidence

In a recent decision, a Federal District Court in Michigan ruled that while social media is clearly discoverable, there must be some showing of relevance before the court moves to compel full production of a litigant’s Facebook account. In Tompkins v. Detroit Metropolitan Airport (January 2012), the plaintiff suffered a slip-and-fall and later claimed back and other injuries. She sued her employer, who sought full access to her Facebook account in the course of discovery. The court noted that while “material posted on a ‘private’ Facebook page…is generally not privileged, nor is it protected by common law or civil law notions of privacy,” an opposing party does not “have a generalized right to rummage at will through information that Plaintiff has limited from public view. [T]here must be a threshold showing that the requested information is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.”

However, far from completely closing the door on full disclosure of social media accounts, the court notes that:

“If the Plaintiff’s public Facebook page contained pictures of her playing golf or riding horseback, Defendant might have a stronger argument for delving into the non-public section of her account. But based on what has been provided to this Court, Defendant has not made a sufficient predicate showing that the material it seeks is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.”

This case illustrates that any solution purporting to support eDiscovery for social media must have robust public search and collection capabilities. This means more than merely one-off screen scrapes but instead an ability to search, identify and capture up to millions of social media posts on a highly automated and scalable basis, and the ability to find all information that is publicly available but may not be readily apparent.

For instance, X1 Social Discovery has the ability to find an individual’s publicly available content and to collect it in an automated fashion in native format with all available metadata intact to enable systematic and scalable search, review, tagging and analysis. We heard from one major law firm that screen captures of a single public Facebook took several hours, with the resulting images not searchable or organized into a case-centric workflow. Now with X1 Social Discovery, they are able to accomplish this full capture in seconds.

In another recent case involving publicly available Facebook evidence, Bradley v. State of Texas (February 2012), a jury convicted defendant Michael Bradley for armed robbery. The police arrested him several days after the offense when the victim located Bradley’s Facebook page after a tip. There he found, among other things, a picture of Michael Bradley posing with two guns—including one that looked remarkably similar to the gun stolen from the victim during the robbery.

In its opinion denying Bradley’s appeal, the Texas appellate court pointedly noted that “Vast online photo databases—like Facebook—and relatively easy access to them will undoubtedly play an ever-increasing role in identifying and prosecuting suspects.”

This week we are releasing X1 Social Discovery v2.4. This upgrade includes enhanced features to enable a thorough and comprehensive collection of publicly available information on Facebook, Twitter and the web to better assist legal and investigative professionals to make the requisite showings for the production of social media evidence in civil discovery or to establish probable cause to arrest a suspect.

Leave a comment

Filed under Best Practices, Case Law

Tagged as automated and scalable, Bradley v. State of Texas, capture, civil discovery, collection capabilities, discoverable, discovery of admissible evidence, eDiscovery for social media, Facebook, Federal District Court, identify, investigative professionals, legal, Metropolitan Airport, Michael Bradley, Michigan, millions of social media posts, probable cause to arrest a suspect, production, Public Facebook, robust public search, screen scrapes, search, slip-and-fall, social media, social media evidence, Tompkins v. Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Twitter, X1 Social Discovery

February 8, 2012 · 8:50 AM

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.

1 Comment

Filed under Best Practices, Preservation & Collection, Social Media Metadata

Tagged as analysis, Case Study, case-centric workflow, collect, collection, computer forensics, consultantsc, D4, data, eDiscovery consulting, eDiscovery Service Provider, Facebook, fast-as-you-type, law firms, Law Technology News, LinkedIn, LTN, Peter Coons, screen capture, searching, sorting, X1 Social Discovery

Blogger

@patzakis

@x1discovery

Search this Blog

Subscribe to Blog

Blog Stats

Tags

Blog Topics

Popular Posts

Copyright

Tag Archives: X1 Social Discovery

Case Study: The Importance of Integrated Social Media and Website Crawling Collection

Share this:

Surging Wage and Hour Class Action Suits and the Importance of Social Media Evidence

Share this:

Jurors All “Atwitter”

Share this:

Tompkins v. Detroit Metropolitan Airport; the Importance of Systematic Public Search of Social Media Evidence

Share this:

A Real World Social Media Discovery Case Study From the Trenches

Share this:

Blogger

@patzakis

@x1discovery

Search this Blog

Subscribe to Blog

Blog Stats

Tags

Blog Topics

Popular Posts