Written in Collaboration with Alli Hartmann
Defending against a class action lawsuit comes with a lot of baggage – and by baggage, we mean hundreds or even thousands of claimants. Even with a sizable legal team, discovering, investigating, and collecting evidence to separate legitimate claims from fraudulent ones can be overwhelming. And to keep your discovery ethical and unbiased, you should be using repeatable, scope-driven investigative processes for each claimant.
Keyword Searching
Scope-driven searching is the length and depth of a social media investigation and narrows the focus of your discovery applied to each claimant in the class, seeking to either prove or disprove the legitimacy of the claim. Keyword searching can determine if a plaintiff has interacted with a defendant, mentioned the defendant, or posted about a topic that coincides with the investigation. By customizing keywords, and scope-driven phrases, OSINT analysts can hone in on the most important photos, videos, comments, and posts on a person’s social media profile.
Customized Scope Filtering
Customized scope filtering applied to plaintiffs can help determine which claims are legitimate or fraudulent. Information that can narrow your scope include: case information, date of loss, content-specific relevance, or a claimant’s opinions or position. Customized scope limits general results which could provide extraneous information. For example, a customized scope filter can search specifically for the plaintiff pictured with the product or service in question or other products that could have caused similar damages.
Unbiased, Repeatable Process
While customizable keywords and scope-driven searching can be helpful, unbiased discovery is necessary and a repeatable process ensures each claimant is evaluated completely and judiciously. And because you could be applying the same process to hundreds or thousands of subjects, performing the task at scale with certified analysts equipped with necessary tools and training is of utmost importance, not to mention, ethical and compliant with federal regulations.
Creating a narrow focus group of claimants for your defense strategy can be a headache for a legal team, but SMI Aware can help sort through large-scale classes using scope-driven, repeatable processes. Our unbiased, ethical investigation practices have assisted in more than 10 product liability class actions and investigate over 3,000 subjects per year saving legal defense teams and the companies they serve time and money. If you are interested in learning more, contact SMI Aware to start your large-scale class action investigations, today!