Handling chat data in the age of the AI investigator

The way we are using technology is changing the face of Digital Forensics and eDiscovery. What used to be an email is now a quick text message. What used to be an in-person meeting is now a Zoom call with recorded video and transcription. We generate massive amounts of short messages rather than the long-form traditional documents seen in the past. The data is complex with chats being tightly interrelated with video recordings, images, emoji and more. The eDiscovery and Digital Forensic fields can no longer rely on the ability of teams to review this data manually. Automated processes traditionally ignored chats and were not designed for their intricacies. However, just when the scale of the problem was becoming untenable, computer aided review workflows and processes have evolved to help. The Generative AI revolution has been embraced by the legal field to utilise state of the art categorisation and document summarisation algorithms. This article traces the evolution of chat data, how and why it is such a problem in the legal domain and how GenAI can be used to help.