DiscoveryMining

This is a bit off-topic, however, it is still somewhat relevant to us in e-discovery. I was poking around the PBS website and ran across a cool search feature. PBS has done a good job of integrating ’search inside video’ into their website and offering it as a standard option. I was playing around with the News Hour search and you can search the last seven years of video right there on the site. Not only does it give you the episode that you’re looking for, it will also take you to the section in the transcript AND the section in the video that you’re interested in.

Video search is big business and there are lots of companies going after this market–but why aren’t the major networks offering this as well? Typically most shows are closed captioned, and so I would guess the text is there. When thinking about this type of technology, you can easily apply it to e-discovery and litigation support all around. Imagine the following senario: during a deposition a reference is made to a document. On the fly, that document is found on a review platform. The closely related documents are brought up along with a time-line and reference to other depositions. Integrating multiple search technologies with the power of a review platform and trail prep, in this manner, would be groundbreaking. I’m sure people are working on it, but our friends at PBS have a nifty tool in the meantime.

Just some cool findings for this Monday.