Take a step back and think about your daily life and how social media ties into pretty much everything nowadays – a trajectory that has taken place over the past 15+ years – and recently the legal industry, which sometimes has been slow to accept change, is finally seeing the light.
The reality is that many cases today ranging from civil to criminal have some aspect of social media tied to them, and the internal teams at law firms (Am Law 100 firms, etc.) don’t have the expertise and social media analytics tools needed to truly make sense of everything. And that’s where bringing in outside help could mean the difference between winning or losing a verdict.
Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to provide guidance and social media expert witness testimony for a variety of high-profile cases covered by all major news outlets, and through that time up until now, we saw a spike in demand for social media expert witnesses which has grown exponentially. And most importantly, how having the right data/knowledge on your side will make or break a case.
The demand for social media expert witnesses will continue to rise while more and more cases involve aspects of social media where many times attorneys and judges are just not familiar with social networks, slang/terminology used, emojis and a host of other things. But when things are broken down simply and methodically everything starts to make sense.
If you are currently handling a case that involves social media or anticipate an issue in the future that requires a social media expert witness, be sure to ask the tough questions especially when it comes to what makes them a true “expert” while also gauging not only their expertise but also how they present themselves. Someone can be a genius but if it comes down to them having to testify in court and they flop in front of a jury then all of the genius is lost.
What makes Soteria Intelligence unique is that our team guided social media in the early days ranging from creating then launching the first social strategies for Fortune 500 companies to being beta users on the first social media analytics tools, and while going down that path we saw the roadblocks and ways around them. Why? Because the social media analytics world, even up until this day, has been based on simple combinations of keywords.
Imagine the drastic difference between “I am shooting hoops at school” versus “I am shooting people at school” and by looking at keyword combinations to produce actionable insights the process is flawed from the beginning. It’s like the classic book The Boy Who Cried Wolf where you become numb to “alerts” because they’re false positives/negatives for the most part.
Similarly, an influencer posting a photo of pizza and saying “it’s the sh!t” versus “it tastes like sh!t” could be the difference between millions of dollars in sales or millions of dollars in losses. If you’re one of the top pizza companies how do you navigate the linguistics in near real-time?
That is the problem we set out to solve before developing our patented deep learning ecosystem that goes above and beyond keyword combinations while also allowing users to provide feedback: A “Human-in-the-Loop” system where false positives/negatives aren’t simply tossed in the trash, but instead recycled as valuable pieces of training data that live on in the future.
Tying this back to the legal world and social media expert witnesses, there’s something to be said about being a master of a trade but when you’re being sucked into a black hole of litigation you have to put your best foot forward, and that leads to bridging the gap between wild theories as opposed to using data to demonstrate the actual results.
In a nutshell: Social media will continue to play a big role in the legal space.