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How Can Your Law Firm Use Facial Recognition Technology?

By William Vogeler, Esq. | Last updated on

Maybe you can pick a face out of a crowd -- but how about a crowd of 10,000 faces?

Didn't think so. Neither did the lawyers who were trying to prove that a plaintiff was not at certain corporate events over a span of years. They had 10 terabytes of images but not enough time or money to review them.

Facial recognition software solved their problem. Don't you just love it when law and technology come together?

Timely Discovery

True story, according to Legal Tech News. Advanced Discovery saved the law firm countless hours by creating a program to scan the images and identify a particular face.

"There has to be other cases and situations like this," said Rick Hutchinson, chief technology officer. "So we built a flexible software platform where it can integrate into industry-known platforms such as Relativity."

The company has filed a patent for its software, which is designed to work with service providers. It is not the only facial recognition software in the law game, but it definitely adds a new wrinkle to discovery.

Hutchinson said it already works with back end review platforms. It is available through eDiscovery platforms like kCura's Relativity and Ipro's Eclipse.

Facing Competition

LTU Technologies also deployed facial recognition software for eDiscovery. Nuix 7 developed a processing engine, using facial recognition technology to filter images for investigation. Other software companies are working on similar programs.

Jury consultant Susan Constantine, through Jury Lab, uses Affectiva's technology to read peoples' emotions from their faces. With a custom application, she consults with clients about jury reactions.

Constantine said the software reads all jurors' faces simultaneously and compares them to an enormous database of facial expressions to measure responses for feelings like contempt or disgust. She said it is 95 percent effective.

"It's not the collection of the data," she said, "it's the analyzing the data with a high level of sophistication, the training, knowing what to look for and how to analyze it."

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