The View From Up North: New Legal App Trolls Social Media For Evidence
TrialDrone is a cool social media aggregator with implications for criminal lawyers, civil litigators, police, and prosecutors.
Time for another column about lawyers doing interesting things, other than practicing law.
Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and on and on. Is it trite to say social media is everywhere? Yes, I think it is trite. But, I’ll say it anyway: Social media is ev-‘ry-where.
Twenty years, ago you could pass out drunk on the bathroom floor and wake up with little more than a hangover as the repercussion. Today, one of your “friends” will pull down your underwear, take several unflattering pictures of your butt, and post it on Twitter for the whole world to enjoy.
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Forever.
That’s the world we live in now.
Which means, of course, it’s time for the legal profession to play catch up. Meet Sean MacDonald. He’s a criminal lawyer in Toronto who worked his way through law school as a private investigator. About 18 months ago, he was introduced to a company with a cool social media application and immediately saw the implications for the legal profession.
Two months ago, on that back of that app, he launched Trial Drone. What is Trial Drone, you ask? Essentially, it’s a social media aggregator. Pick a location, say Boston, and a date, say April 15, 2013, and Trial Drone will cull through the universe of social media to find all the social media messages that occurred in Boston on that date.
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Some of you may have twigged to April 15, 2013. The infamous Boston Marathon bombings happened on that horrible day. Sean showed me the result of a search of the 12 hours surrounding the event. He identified 3,295 potential witnesses from that search. I’m sure the FBI also conducted its own social media search. Maybe they had similar technology to Sean’s. If not, however, imagine the man-hours it would take to cull through millions of posts on Twitter, Facebook, etc., to find anything relevant.
Trial Drone does it for you in seconds.
In addition to time-frame and location searches, the user can also conduct key word searches. Thus, the user could search “Boston Bombings” and “eyewitness” to see if anyone posted to social media outside of the location/time-frame search parameters. Perhaps a witness took a picture of the Tsarnaev brothers walking through the crowd moments before the bombs went off, but did not post the picture until the next day when the witness returned to his home in New York.
Having seen it in action, this is a very cool piece of legal tech. I can think of a number of implications for criminal lawyers, civil litigators, police, and prosecutors.
Imagine a criminal lawyer defending an accused murderer. It’s the accused versus the unlimited resources of the state. Say it’s being done by legal aid, so the criminal lawyer doesn’t have a massive budget to conduct her own investigation. There is a lifetime of freedom on the line.
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As an ex-private investigator for criminal lawyers, Sean often simply knocked on door after door in the immediate area of the crime looking for witnesses. That takes time and money. With Trial Drone, the investigation can start with a location and time-frame search. The results could provide a number of high-quality witnesses based on social media posts. Perhaps someone videoed the crime in progress. Perhaps some hipster posted a picture of the delicious mocha-frapp-latte he bought at Starbucks on the corner where the crime occurred.
Sean notes that most witnesses disperse from a major event within three minutes. Instead of knocking on door after door, wouldn’t it be more efficient (and cheaper) to track down people who might have been at the scene of the crime, as revealed by their social media output? “Hey, Hipster, you were in the Starbucks right when the crime occurred. Did you see anything?”
How about insurance fraud? You suspect “bad back” Joe is fraudulently collecting long-term disability. Trial Drone can monitor Joe’s social media posts. It can also determine Joe’s closest connections, such as friends and family. Trial Drone can then monitor the whole group’s social media output. Aha, there’s a picture of Joe squatting 600 pounds at the gym posted by his cousin. Bad back, my butt. Busted!
Even though Trial Drone launched mere months ago, it’s already getting excellent buzz. The Virginia Trial Lawyers Association was apparently blown away by a demonstration. One of Virginia’s top plaintiff lawyers, Jonathan Halperin, is an early adopter. I’ve never met Halperin, but near as I can tell he’s the type of lawyer you retain on contingency when you’ve sustained a catastrophic injury and need an insurance company to pay for a lifetime of care.
You can immediately see the benefit Trial Drone would provide to Halperin. It’s another tool in his toolbox, helping Halperin find witnesses to the accident. In a world where social media is ubiquitous, not knowing what might be out there on social media means not having the full picture. For a lawyer of Halperin’s stature, who is chasing millions for his clients, not having the full picture could be the difference between winning and losing (or settling for $3 million versus $2 million).
Having said that, is Trial Drone going to provide a smoking gun in every case? No, obviously. But, again, with your client’s freedom on the line, or with your client facing a lifetime of physical therapy, can you afford to not turn over every stone — especially when turning over the social media stone just became so much easier with Trial Drone?
I think not.
Sean has high hopes for Trial Drone, and even higher hopes for what it means to his future. Whereas, I would be thinking about cashing out for millions and sitting on a beach, mint julep in hand, Sean is far nobler than I. If the company is financially successful, he intends to pull the chute on practicing criminal law for cash… and switch to practicing criminal law full-time for free.
Sean is passionate about wrongful convictions. This stems from a childhood watching his lawyer-father fight for the little guy. He already sits on the board of directors of The Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, an organization that has exonerated 20+ people who have been wrongly convicted (mostly for murder). Sean wants to spend his days providing pro bono services to clients he believes have been wrongfully jailed.
As I said, noble. I am crossing my fingers that Trial Drone becomes a huge success, giving Sean the time and resources to put the gloves on full-time for people the system has failed.
That’s the View From Up North. Have a great week.
Steve Dykstra is a Canadian-trained lawyer and legal recruiter. He is the President of Steven Dykstra Law Professional Corporation, a boutique corporate/commercial law firm located in the greater Toronto area. You can contact Steve at steve@stevendykstralaw.ca. You can also read his blog at stevendykstra.wordpress.com, follow him on Twitter (@Law_Think), or connect on LinkedIn (ca.linkedin.com/in/stevedykstra/).
