Legal professionals use court case videos to verify the authenticity of information and to increase the transparency of the judicial process. Lawyers, judges, and other legal personnel use these case videos as any other case-related documents. This means that these videos need to be as searchable and as available to legal professionals as any other regular Word document. Easier said than done.

Considering the fact that Courts deal with sensitive situations where real people are involved (very often in a somewhat vulnerable state), the security of these videos must be at the highest possible level. Meaning, court case videos must be stored safely, transcribed quickly and accurately, by reliable staff, and used on-time.

The Challenge of Using Traditional Transcription Services

Because of the sensitive information covered in these videos, Courts and Court workers should move away from relying on traditional transcription service providers. The more people get involved in handling sensitive data, the higher is the risk of data leakage.

There are tons of web-based transcription service providers where you upload a file, an unknown staff process it, and you have a downloadable transcript. Sounds good and easy, but this black-box approach to sensitive video transcription services leaves a lot of unanswered security questions:

• Who did the transcription?
• How good are they at keeping secrets?
• Did the file upload pass through a secured connection?
• Is the company using a secure server to store the videos?
• Did the transcript come through an encrypted connection?
• Is the video safely deleted from the vendor’s servers?
• Is there a way to ensure that nobody else will get their hands on the transcript?

This is why Courts need a closed system of handling sensitive video materials, where the recordings and transcripts aren’t directly accessed by non-court personnel.

Here’s a list of desired deliverables of such a closed, fully automated transcription system:

• This closed system would be built by components that comply with data handling safety licenses.
• The system would be almost infinitely scalable, so there is no limit to how many videos can be safely stored.
• The system would need to be extremely accurate in transcribing the videos, and have a way to add timestamps to the transcribed document.

The good news is that video storage solutions and multimedia transcription software is commercially available. Multimedia handling has been a growing industry, and the legal sector is in a position to choose.

How Amazon Is Becoming The Go-To Vendor For Video Transcription and Storage

While Amazon.com is a household brand and we buy anything from books to groceries on Amazon, the company has been on the leading edge in some very interesting technologies.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is a Cloud platform for hosting web applications that need vast processing power and even greater storage capacities. AWS helps companies focus on their software, while Amazon handles the server infrastructure. In a sense, software companies use Amazon’s Platform as a Service approach for building scalable solutions.

Amazon Transcribe is another service that is available on the market. Transcribe can take a multimedia file stored on an Amazon S3 server and convert a video conversation into a properly annotated and timestamped text.

Amazon AI is a result of Amazon’s huge investments in Artificial Intelligence too. From the humble product recommendation feature on Amazon.com, they’ve come a long way. Combining AI and their Transcribe service, users can even use subject matter related dictionaries, so that Amazon can have a sample of words probably used in the video. This increases the transcription accuracy and returns a close to perfect transcription.

This integration will help you derive value from your Court case videos, and make them more accessible and searchable, filed properly with names, addresses, people involved, etc.

AWS transcribe platform can help you with all of this and much more:

1. The transcribe platform allows you to create your own custom vocabulary list. As legal professionals, you are aware that your vocabulary differs from the common use of language. With this feature of AWS Transcribe integrated into Armedia Legal Case Management solution, you increase the accuracy of your Court video transcription.
2. With its many features, this platform can identify multiple speakers in a video content.
   It can recognize up to 5 different people in the same video and offer a divided-by-speaker text, or an XML file with timestamps and labels distinguishing between speakers.
   This is crucial when transcribing court case videos since attributing the transcribed text to the wrong speaker could change the course of the entire case.
3. With AWS Transcribe, the transcripts of your court case videos will be almost 100% accurate and ready to use. That’s because AWS Transcribe adds needed punctuation to the text and automatically generate timestamps for each word in the transcript.
   At the same time, this platform provides a confidence score which shows how confident the platform is with the transcription provided. As a user, this feature enables you to always know whether a particular line of the transcript needs alterations, and whenever necessary, you can make alterations in the text.

All these features allow AWS Transcribe to produce texts that are ready to use, without additional edits. Court case videos transcribed with AWS Transcribe are indexed properly, searchable, and very easy to work with.

But all this will be of limited help to legal workers if they can’t somehow easily integrate Amazon Transcribe into their core legal case management system. These transcripts will need to be assigned and limited to specific cases. That way, only the legal workers assigned to that case can easily access the transcriptions whenever they need them.

And this brings me to the next point.

The Armedia Legal Module For ArkCase

If you’ve followed my blogs for just a little bit, you’ll know how big we are on ArkCase. So far, we’ve built several specific solutions using ArkCase as our platform for case management.

As you may have read in other blog posts, we use ArkCase because it’s an open source case management system that integrates with all the key players: Alfresco, AWS, Ephesoft, Snowbound, MS Exchange etc.

We’ve taken this open platform and built a Legal module, turning the generic case management platform into a legal case management solution that’s very easy to use, and has almost limitless potential to accommodate your data storage needs.

The way we built the Armedia Legal Case Management solution is that we’ve added configurable workflows, forms, rules and access-level management features needed to run a Legal case. Plus, we’ve added a seamless integration with Amazon Transcribe.

Let me explain how a video transcription would work.

When you create a legal case, all the forms and workflows are set in place. Then, a legal worker with the needed access level rights can upload a video or audio recording. This multimedia material gets uploaded onto a secured S3 server. Then, once uploaded, AWS kicks in and provides the needed processing power to quickly and accurately transcribe the videos.

The end result is a neatly timestamped transcription file that you can search through just as easily as if it was a regular Word or PDF file.

In simpler words, Armedia Legal is a Legal Case Management Software solution with built-in transcription and video management. This makes our Legal Module perfect for managing and using all court case videos in a safe and secure way, without any worries about data leakage. The best thing about it is that we’re relying on Amazon’s PaaS, and you don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Let’s Sum Up

As a legal professional, you must be concerned about the security of the data you deal with in every case. Especially court case videos.
Data leakage is something no legal body can afford. Even if there is just a tiny opportunity of risk, like the case of using traditional transcribe service providers, you’ll want to avoid it.

Using traditional transcription service providers means allowing an unknown third party to gain access to sensitive materials that can harm you or your clients.

This is why you’re better off relying on a closed system like Amazon Web Services to store, process and transcribe your legal video materials.

We’ve built the Armedia Legal Case Management solution so you can avoid the risks of data breaches, by integrating with Amazon Transcribe. It rests on ArkCase, an open source case management system that is a great platform for building cost-effective case management solutions.

If you have any questions or you want to find out more about our Legal Module, feel free to contact us or check out our Webinar.