SENTIMENT AND BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS IN EDISCOVERY

A suspect or person-of-interest during legal case review or forensic evidence review can exhibit signs of their individual personality through the digital evidence collected for the case. Such personality traits of interest can be analytically harvested for case investigators or case reviewers. However, manual review of evidence for such flags can take time and contribute to increased costs. This study focuses on certain use-case scenarios of behavior and sentiment analysis as a critical requirement for a legal case’s success. This study aims to quicken the review and analysis phase and offers a software prototype as a proof-of-concept. The study starts with the build and storage of Electronic Stored Information (ESI) datasets for three separate fictitious legal cases using publicly available data such as emails, Facebook posts, tweets, text messages and a few custom MS Word documents. The next step of this study leverages statistical algorithms and automation to propose approaches towards identifying human sentiments, behavior such as, evidence of financial fraud behavior, and evidence of sexual harassment behavior of a suspect or person-of-interest from the case ESI. The last stage of the study automates these approaches via a custom software and presents a user interface for eDiscovery teams and digital forensic investigators.