061: Order in The Court: Digital Evidence Management Makes Organizing Exhibits Easy For Attorneys

Steve Glisky:

Welcome to the Paperless Productivity Podcast, where we have experts give you the insights, know-how and resources to help you transform your workplace from paper to digital while making your work life better at the same time.

Kevin Kowalkowski:

Thank you for joining me. My name is Kevin Kowalkowski, and I’ll be your host for today’s podcast.

Recently ImageSoft hosted our annual customer conference Velocity 2021 virtually. While we were not able to host our event in person as we normally do, this year’s event was still packed full of the industry’s hottest topics, plaguing organizations today. The weekly sessions included Q and A with industry leaders, a review of digital technology solutions, including live demonstrations of our digital evidence management, online dispute resolution, and electronic signature solutions.

For today’s podcast, we wanted to share an edited portion of the digital evidence management or DEM session with Peter Hagood established civil attorney and digital evidence enthusiast. With over 25 years of hands-on experience, Peter understands how crucial evidence is to his role and how digital evidence management can benefit attorneys, district attorneys, and other roles within the court system.

Let’s listen in as Scott Bade our CEO and Product Visionary at ImageSoft introduces Peter Hagood.

Scott Bade:

Without further ado, I am going to introduce Mr. Hagood. Peter is an attorney, who’s been practicing law for some two decades. He’s a litigator, he’s practicing in a variety of case types, real estate, community association, law, personal injury, insurance litigation, civil, healthcare, not a ton of criminal. Peter’s very passionate about the law. He’s a student of the law. He’s coauthored and presented at a number of seminars. So, he’s a subject matter expert in many areas and a leader in the legal community, particularly in the state of Florida. He’s a member of the Florida Bar, U.S. District Court for the middle district of Florida and member of the Orange County Bar.

So, without further ado, I thank you and welcome Peter Hagood.

Peter Hagood:

Scott, Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. And look forward to having an open discourse with you. I think it’s the product that you’re talking about is a need that has been out there for some time. And I think that the attorneys are the ones who are going to benefit from it tremendously as well as the court system. But over the last five or 10 years, I’ve seen, this trend people who are just like you said, scared of the cloud, and don’t want to acknowledge it and have been fighting it. But I think it is the future. And I think that this product is going to allow those people to integrate what they do on a daily basis.

And so, it’s exciting to talk to you and to your company about it.

Scott Bade:

Thanks, Peter. So, not everybody on this call is an attorney. So, can you just give us a day in the life? Let’s say you’re working on a complex civil case, or even a criminal case. What’s it like managing evidence, particularly digital evidence that maybe you’re receiving from defendants or from as discovery from the other side? Can you just kind of talk in general about how you manage that as a long-term practicing attorney?

Peter Hagood:

Yeah, and that’s a great question because it’s one of the most problematic things to do, especially in a complex case. And I’m going to use one of my cases that we’re dealing with now, which is a construction litigation case. And when you start the lawsuit, and you start to do your discovery, it sometimes, is just staggering the amount of documents, that you start to have come in. But on top of that, it’s not just the written documents or the hard documents. Sometimes you’re going to have a mixed amount of evidence that you’re going to be using. For instance, you’ll have a potentially some video, you’ll have some photographic evidence. You may have some actual hard, hard evidence, meaning, a product, a type of rebar or a type of lumber or something that you’re using that you’re going to need to, and that you can’t use. And you have to bring in eventually, but the nice part about, or the hardest part about what I deal with on one of those complex cases is the voluminous amount of evidence that needs to be stored, in a capacity that can be easily accessible throughout the duration of the case. So, the documents continue to come in and you red flag them and you mark them. But the documents continue to come in and come in and come in until some point discoveries cut off. But then you’ve got to go back and organize them and be able to present them. And sometimes it’s presenting one form of evidence along with another, that makes it difficult.

And especially when you get to trial and especially in the light of COVID and the pandemic, I was not in the courthouse for over a year. We just started going back to hearings in person in the last two months before that everything was via a Zoom, or Microsoft teams or something like that. And that was even more problematic with regard to evidence production. But what I find is a civil practitioner is the voluminous amount of evidence that you have in trying to marshal it and keep it organized in one location and then have it easily accessible, not only to yourself, but to the judge, maybe during hearings or pretrial hearings or evidentiary hearings, things of that nature, that’s when it becomes very problematic. Because you don’t want to carry in 10 boxes of documents only to pull out in a certain amount, but you have to be prepared in case you have to look for something or find something. So, what this product is I think going to help and from what I see and what I, I know of it, and in the limited use that I have of it is that it allows the practitioner to easily organize different forms of evidence and then present or access it in an easy manner.

That’s the biggest problem I have with the complex cases and the amount of evidence that I have. I’ve got to bring a staff member, if not two, sometimes to a hearing and or trial simply to help me with finding documents. And that becomes a burden it’s time consuming, you have to know where everything is. They have to know where everything is. And so, it really is a challenge for a practitioner in a complex civil case. And I can only imagine in a complex criminal case, what it would be like.

Scott Bade:

Yeah. You mentioned the pandemic and you’re just now getting back into, into the courtroom. So, have you seen, and maybe it’s too early, but have you seen any changes in the way the courts are requiring you to work related to evidence because of the pandemic?

Peter Hagood:

Yeah. And in fact, I can tell you that in, in some specifically, and, and this is a huge topic in the state of Florida is evictions. The moratorium evictions, mortgage foreclosures were an issue. All the hearings that you typically would have done in person went to an online format. Which meant any, and all the documents that you may have presented at that hearing had to be filed with the court were accessible to the court prior to the hearing and certain they had every county had a little bit of format. But where you might be able to have a notice of something that you hadn’t filed yet, all was now required to be filed prior to the hearing so that the court could review it. The court had access to it. And again, I think that’s the trend where we’re going on it just in general, but the pandemic certainly brought that to the forefront and made it a priority. And a lot of the counties have changed their local rules. And a lot of the judges have to sometimes judges have a certain format that they want you to follow and certain things they want you to do. But overall, it required you to make sure that anything that you were going to present or discuss or do was within that court file. And typically, that’s not unusual, but when you can’t do it physically, now you’ve got to do it virtually or through some type of software that we’re talking about today.

Scott Bade:

And I know you’re not a criminal attorney, but you’re still dealing with evidence in civil cases and other types of cases that you handle. Speak to the layman out there and talk to the IT people, what are the rules for handling and managing and preserving evidence, that you’re aware of, that we need to be conscious of?

Just to preface, I think everybody’s aware of the chain of custody rules regarding criminal evidence. But I know, there’s gotta be some rules and regulations around all types of evidence that maybe you could speak to that in general.

Peter Hagood:

That video showed the incident that was alleged. It showed the conduct both before, during and after. And once that video was, then we were able to, to dissect it and view it. The case resolved. Simply because of that. So, when we talk about how important this type of evidence of this digital preservation, it is absolutely important in some instances. You know, especially in light of, and again, I don’t do a lot of criminal, but from the civil perspective, there are cameras everywhere, there’s video everywhere. And so, when we’re talking about potentially, motor vehicle accidents or personal injuries of any kind and there’s cameras out there, but that those cameras are being saved on different systems, whether or not those systems can be integrated so that everybody, can view that document in its original format becomes a critical issue.

Scott Bade:

Yeah, that’s a great point. And yeah, just to reiterate part of the solution is a tool, there is technology that was actually developed by former law enforcement people. So, it was developed in a very strict and precise way. Part of the trick with video is, whenever you compress video, you lose frames and losing frames is a no-no in the evidence world. Even if the frame is apparently unimportant, you can’t compress and lose frames. So. That’s part of the challenge is being able to read a format that maybe was proprietary and turn it into a, or render it into a format that is viewable in a, in a public player, like anything on your windows, or Mac machine or your phone.

And have it be an exact representation and be able to more importantly, if it’s ever challenged bring in an expert witness that can explain why. Why we had to render it and why it’s exactly the same video and audio that was from the original camera. That’s, that’s a really important point. It’s a bit, it’s a bit nerdy tech speak, but it, video is a complicated thing because it’s a combination of many pictures obviously, and audio. And so, it’s a more complex format than any, than a, obviously a PDF or a, or even just audio because it has multiple dimensions to it. And, and there are so many ways that the video can be compressed and changed to make it more usable by certain platforms like your phone.

But you can’t do that. If you’re going to try to present this to court. So, you have to kind of push aside a lot of the tooling that maybe is available in the commercial world, because it’s not good enough and you really have to use specialized tools. And the good news is those tools are now mature. They’ve been out there for a while. The tool we work with product called iNPUT-ACE can handle virtually every with a 90 high, 90% conversion rate every format that that’s known in the closed circuit and body-worn camera world or in the cell phone video world. So, there is good news on that front.

There are tools and that’s, part of the solution that we offer, is providing some server-based tools that can, in mass quantities convert this, or I should say, render this into a format that’s more usable downstream. So that’s great.

Peter Hagood:

Well, I’m going to comment on the digital, the video. There’s another case we had about two years ago, where we had a video that again was depicting the, the alleged incident both before, during and after. It was a video of a gas pump and there was an incident that happened around the gas pump. I won’t go into exactly what happened, but the defendants had showed a video clip of it. And during trial, we recognize that the videos seemed to be different than what was discussed and what was argued at and what was shared prior to trial. And ultimately it was determined that they had altered their clips, that they were going to show by deleting almost three and a half minutes in the three and a half minutes were immediately after where this alleged incident happening. And it particularly showed my client in the area, but not doing what was allegedly said that they had done or not done. And again, so it was funny because that was what’s happening. And when you’re talking about a video, there’s not really much you can do, but when you can go analyze it in the format that you’re talking about, you can specifically talk about what frames are missing and show those frames.

And what we ended up doing is canceling, is terminating that day of court coming back the next day. But we had to travel all night, get a video production guy to say here’s the three and a half minutes that they deleted. Here’s what it shows. And I think, what you’re talking about would allow that to happen in a much faster, almost real time situation in the right hand. So again, when we talk about these solutions is exactly what I think the court system needs.

Scott Bade:

Yeah, it can turn everyday folks with a little bit of tech knowledge into experts on video very quickly. And you’re absolutely right. Most, in most cases it’s very, very difficult to alter a video and not leave any evidence behind that you’ve altered it. It’s almost impossible because things like you said frames are missing it becomes pretty obvious.

I don’t know if you had to deal with any phone evidence, Peter. I know that everybody’s got smartphones now and, there’s all sorts of evidence on a phone from text messages to pictures to video.

Peter Hagood:

Right now, we’re dealing with a case like that. And we’re trying to get, the phone carrier to release their documents and, it’s a burden, they don’t want to, we’ve got to go to the court to get, that order to compel them to. Their attorneys jump in claiming all kinds of privileges and proprietary issues, which I don’t think they really are. But we’re all we want to do is take, get the, get all the text, not just one part of the text we want the whole from the beginning to the end, so that we can see the entire context of what it was as opposed to one screenshot.

I think that’s what we’re seeing more and more. And so, again, your tool, which allows for that enormous amount of data to be captured and then organized, is going to be paramount to helping out both prosecution and defense. I mean, it works both ways. But it’s funny because that’s something that we’re dealing with now, I’ve got a case where I’ve got a hundred different screen shots. Part of one message because we can’t get the entire stream from the carrier. So, it’s certainly relevant right now. And again, we’re just looking for the context of what was said between the two parties. And this is in a civil matter, not a criminal matter. So again, very relevant.

Scott Bade:

Peter, thank you for joining us. We appreciate your perspective. I know this was short and we could probably go on for another hour. But thank you again, for joining us much appreciated.

Peter Hagood:

Well, Scott, thank you for having me.

 Kevin Kowalkowski:

Thanks for joining us today. If you’d like to learn more about ImageSoft’s, evidence-based solution for storing sharing and streamlining your court cases, please visit www.ImageSoft.com/courts/digital evidence dash management.

Thank you so much.

Steve Glisky:

Thanks again for joining us on this podcast. To learn more about ImageSoft, please visit nathana12.sg-host.com that’s ImageSoft I-N-C .com if you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to Paperless Productivity, where we tackle some of the biggest paper-based pain points facing organizations today. We’ll see you next time.