A conference Friday will demonstrate how to effectively utilize electronic evidence in the courtroom.
UF’s third annual Electronic Discovery Reference Model Electronic Discovery Conference will highlight how big data is shifting the litigation process and how it now involves social media, mobile devices and cloud storage. The event will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Holland Hall 180: Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom in the UF Levin College of Law.
Craig Ball, a court-appointed special master — someone who testifies as an expert — on computer forensics and electronic discovery, is the keynote speaker.
Ball said tangible evidence, such as hair and bloodstains, only makes up a small portion of evidence. Most evidence today is data, which can be recorded in smoke detectors, mobile phones, the cloud and, recently, our watches.
“The world is just teeming with electronic evidence, and you just have to learn how to see it and how to use it,” Ball said.
The event is free to UF students and faculty as well as judges, judicial staff and government employees. There will be expert panels discussing specialized software that filters information based on search terms and algorithms to ease the litigation process.
They will also demonstrate how to effectively record and sort the data to create a compelling story.
William Hamilton, the executive director of the UF Law E-Discovery Project, said he lives on his phone since the shift to data utilization.
“Data tells what’s happening in a person’s life,” Hamilton said. “It’s really better than memory.”
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 3/25/2015 under the headline “Conference to present on importance of data evidence”]
