Best Practices for Implementing Legal AI Workflows Involving Audio and Video Evidence
Summary:
- Digital evidence is involved in the vast majority of crimes, but reviewing and redacting video and audio manually is time-consuming.
- AI can streamline legal workflows by automating tasks like transcription, redaction, translation, and object/person detection, helping legal teams review evidence faster and more accurately.
- Implementing AI starts with centralizing evidence in a digital management system. This enables scalable, efficient, and privacy-compliant case management and processing, reducing burnout and increasing case capacity.
Digital evidence plays a critical role in modern investigations and legal proceedings. From surveillance footage to audio recordings and smartphone videos, today’s legal cases often hinge on data captured by digital devices. In fact, the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that video evidence is involved in 80% of crimes.
With cameras and microphones practically everywhere—in businesses, public spaces, and private homes—legal teams face a growing challenge: how to efficiently review, process, and present digital evidence in court without compromising its integrity or missing key information.
The challenges of handling audio and video evidence
The review process for digital evidence is often time-consuming and labor-intensive. A single hour of video footage can take seven hours or more to manually redact to ensure that sensitive details like faces, license plates, or private conversations are obscured. And that’s just for one video. Multiply that by dozens or even hundreds of files in a single case, and the task becomes overwhelming.
Moreover, it’s not just about reviewing and redacting. Legal professionals must ensure accuracy, protect privacy, and avoid missing critical moments that could make or break a case. Traditional manual methods are no longer enough. The risk of human error, fatigue, and backlog is simply too high. That changes with AI.
Why legal teams need AI
Legal teams that have adopted AI-powered tools have not only streamlined their workflows, but also improved outcomes to meet the increasing demands of digital evidence review.
AI can help:
- Accelerate the review process by identifying and flagging relevant moments automatically.
- Redact sensitive content efficiently without hours of manual labor.
- Transcribe and translate audio to make content more searchable and accessible.
- Track persons of interest and detect vehicles or objects across multiple media files.
By integrating these capabilities, legal teams can save time, reduce errors, and focus more on building strong cases.
How to implement AI into legal workflows
Implementing AI into your legal workflow doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Here are the key steps in this workflow you should consider:
- Centralize your evidence: digital evidence is often scattered across drives, cloud platforms, and external storage devices. Before AI can work its magic, all your evidence must be brought into a centralized digital evidence management system that can support AI tools.
- Automate metadata creation with AI: during eDiscovery, AI can generate rich metadata—details like keywords and objects—that make it easier to quickly filter and locate relevant content.
- Use AI for smart actions: once evidence is prepped, AI can assist with:
- Redaction of faces, names, and other personally identifiable information (PII).
- Transcription and translation in multiple languages.
- Object and vehicle detection for scenes of interest.
- Person and vehicle of interest tracking across multiple videos.
These actions reduce the burden on human reviewers and ensure consistency and compliance, particularly when privacy is a legal concern.
The results: more cases closed, less burnout
Modernizing your approach to evidence review has tangible benefits:
- Faster turnaround times in preparing evidence for trial.
- Reduced workload per case, protecting staff from burnout.
- Higher accuracy in locating and preserving crucial evidence.
- Better privacy protection, ensuring evidential media is court-admissible.
As digital evidence grows, legal teams must evolve to keep pace. Embracing AI isn’t just about working faster—it’s about working smarter, safer, and more effectively.
Sources: