Challenges and Opportunities in using Analytics Combined with Visualisation Techniques for Finding Anomalies in Digital Communications

Digital communication has changed human life since the invention of the internet. The growth of E-mail, social websites and other interpersonal communication systems in turn have brought rapid development in especially the key technological area of data analytics. Using advanced forms of analytics helps the examination of data and better informs investigative sense-making and decision-making of all kinds. The legal process called Electronic discovery (E-discovery) is used for investigating various events in the digital communication world, for the purpose of producing/obtaining evidence (such as evidence in the form of emails used in the Enron fraud case). Investigating digital communications collected over a period of time, manually, is a strenuous process, time consuming, expensive and not very effective. More recently, within E-discovery there has been development of analytics known in the legal community as “Technology assisted review” (TAR). TAR is a technologydriven assistant in E-discovery for identifying relevance in the documents/data which saves time and improves efficiency in investigation. At the same time, the efficacy of visualisation tools currently available in the market is increasing, where such tools depend on a combination of simple keyword searches and more complex representations (e.g. network graphs). Also in E-discovery, early case assessment is a process of estimating risk (cost and time) to prosecute or defend a legal case based on an early review of potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI). Legal firms largely determine the duration of the E-discovery process and charge companies based on the volume of information collected and reviewed after an automated search, where ESI may then be manually reviewed intensely to determine relevance and privilege. This results in significant costs for the company or in a number of cases settlement because a party cannot afford to continue with the lawsuit due to Ediscovery costs. This paper examines some of the opportunities and challenges in searching digital communication data for E-discovery and investigations, and will explore how analytics coupled with visualisation techniques may lend support and guidance in these efforts. Addressing these combined techniques may yet yield improved data collection, analysis and understanding of how analysts/lawyers can work together using visualisations. In particular, we attempt to address two challenges: (i) improving comparison of subsets of data, and (ii) identifying anomalies (including sensitivities) in email communications.