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Social media evidence is increasingly presented in civil lawsuits such as Romano v. Steelcase, in New York, in which a plaintiff claimed an on-the-job injury rendered her unable to move but her Facebook and MySpace profile photos of an active vacation told a different story.

Prosecutors in Chicago also secured a conviction and a 17-year prison sentence several years ago against an alleged gunrunner with the help of Facebook photos that showed him posing with large amounts of cash, flashy vehicles and dozens of firearms.

Plenty of other examples of social media activity being admitted as evidence and wielded for legal leverage are out there. And the list is growing by the day.  

Right now, private investigators are handling the bulk of the social media sleuthing for legal clients. But New York-based electronic-discovery company Hanzo is trumpeting a new, more efficient solution that relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning.  

Legaltech News talked with Keith Laska, a board member of Hanzo, about the company's investigatory software and how it might change social media-focused e-discovery.

How it works: By automating the traditionally manual investigation process, Hanzo Investigator for eDiscovery can rapidly search for and identify social media profiles and posts for a specific person and collect that relevant web content, whether it be a Facebook post or a photo on Instagram, according to Laska.

The process begins with a “capture form” that includes search keywords and other criteria that Hanzo's AI technology uses as if it were a virtual bloodhound sniffing a piece of clothing before sprinting out onto the web to track a person down.

The end result is a timeline complete with geolocation mapping that “provides a story about what you were doing, where you were and what you were saying,” Laska said. And law firms, lawyers and other clients can review the end product as if they were looking at an actual live post or website.

“We make an exact replica,” Laska added, “a replayable version of websites and social media.”

Why is it needed? Relying on smart, automated investigatory software rather than a human investigator can be more efficient and yield more accurate and thorough results, Laska contends.

But he contends the biggest benefit of the technology is that it removes bias from the equation by setting the human investigator aside and letting a machine do the digging.

“The system is unbiased,” Laska argued. “It moves faster than humans. It doesn't sleep. And it ultimately helps find that smoking gun or needle in the haystack that forensic investigators are looking for. It scorches the earth to find things.”

What about privacy concerns? Laska said the “platform is designed to only collect public-facing information.” However, he acknowledged that it could inadvertently scoop up leaked private data, which could raise some novel legal issues.  

Competition: Hanzo competes with several other companies that offer e-discovery collection and archiving services, such as PageFreezer, Page Vault, Smarsh and X1 Social Discovery. But they don't offer the same type of automated investigatory software that Hanzo has unleashed on the marketplace, he said.

“We try to stay away from investigations for the most part,” said Wes Newman, a customer success manager at Page Vault in Chicago. “Typically, when law firms or attorneys come to us they have someone picked out and have a Facebook profile and just need the information collected at that point.”

But when the target of an investigation has a more elusive digital footprint, Hanzo Investigator can find even the faintest social media trails, according to Laska.

“Applying AI and data science is way ahead,” he said. “We're talking 'Jetsons' stuff compared to 'Flintstones.'”