IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: eDiscovery and Artificial Intelligence in 2018

Veritone is a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and solutions with an open, extensible platform that combines powerful applications with orchestrated cognitive computing to transform unstructured data, executing actionable intelligence from public and private content globally.  In today’s IT Briefcase Q&A we sit down with Veritone’s Sr. Director of Product Management, Chris Roks, to learn about how AI is being applied with Legal eDiscovery and Compliance professionals and what lies ahead.

1.  Briefly tell us who Veritone is and how it supports the legal and compliance community:

Veritone harnesses the power of artificial intelligence for e-discovery and compliance professionals enabling them to cost-effectively manage and analyze large volumes of unstructured evidentiary media and case material for the first time and in near real-time at a significantly lower cost than ever available before in the market. Now, the legal and compliance community can proactively monitor activity, prevent problems and mitigate risk.

2.  What are the key features, functions and benefits of your AI solution for eDiscovery users?

Veritone has developed aiWARE, an operating system for artificial intelligence with native applications and a proprietary orchestration layer informed by cutting-edge machine learning. Accessible virtually anywhere, aiWARE is an open, extensible ecosystem of best-in-class cognitive engines, adaptors, and tools that transforms unstructured data into actionable intelligence.

aiWARE employs multiple engines of various classes to process media files for transcription, translation, face recognition, redaction, object recognition, sentiment and more. Utilizing proprietary machine learning technology, the platform intelligently routes media through a workflow of various cognitive engines, automatically optimizing processing to achieve objectives while simultaneously respecting legal priorities.

Once the data has been interrogated, the resulting metadata is then indexed in a temporal database which e-discovery users can use to perform multi-dimensional searches. This type of indexing and searching enables the rapid analysis of petabytes of unstructured data that was never obtainable before.

3.  What is the top trend you are seeing in the AI for Compliance professionals to capitalize on?

Huge volumes of data including conversations from phone recordings, chats and emails can now be analyzed using cognitive engines built specifically to understand noncompliant language. Using natural language processing, transcription, translation and voice and text analysis algorithms, cognitive engines can identify unusual employee behavior and flag terms so management can address issues. This contextual analysis help save businesses money by avoiding fines.

4.  Where do you see the AI marketplace for legal moving to in the next five years?

In the next five years, Veritone expects the AI marketplace for Legal to enable more efficient and less subjective litigation. AI will transform every second or frame of audio or video content into a format that can be searched and analyzed for words, phrases, faces, sentiment, and voice identification. AI can take that unstructured data and produce an index, or structure, within a matter of minutes, automatically culling data and identifying only the most relevant content. This dramatically compresses the time and effort required for eDiscovery and frees lawyers to do what they do best: litigating. This will result in reduced costs and shorter litigation cycles.

At the same time, Veritone expects AI will also drastically decrease the subjective nature of litigation. Subjectivity will always be inherent when humans make decisions. Although machines are not expected to replace human decision makers in the next five years, we expect for AI to make the task of making decisions easier. The subjective nature of litigation will be vastly reduced when decision makers have more relevant, concise, and clear information. AI will lead the charge on this front in the generation and production of this information.

For more information or to view a demonstration of the Veritone aiWARE platform click here.

Chris Roks leads Product Management for the Legal & Compliance and Government divisions at Veritone.  In this role, he designed and launched Veritone’s first entry into the Legal & Compliance marketplace, enabling AI-based cognitive processing of evidentiary media including transcription, translation, object detection, facial recognition, and sentiment analysis.  In addition to this work, Chris led the development and launch of Veritone’s Conductor capability, fusing together several narrow intelligence engines to produce best-in-class transcription results.  Prior to Veritone, Chris was a Product Manager at Amazon, working to launch new Kindle and Appstore experiences worldwide and served as an Air Force Captain, managing the development of several ballistic missile defense satellite systems.  Chris earned his B.S. from the United States Air Force Academy and an MBA from UCLA.