Situation

Our client was working on a large group action relating to damage caused by an alleged failure to maintain its infrastructure appropriately. The infrastructure failed, causing widespread damage. As part of the disclosure process, the defendant in the proceedings disclosed over 50,000 images, including photographs taken of various sites, along with satellite images and video footage. Our client needed to be able to pinpoint where the relevant image or footage was taken to understand more about the relevant damage and where it occurred.

The legal team had historically managed the review of documents like this by batching them out to individual reviewers to critically analyse and map potential locations manually.

Solution

The Sky Discovery innovation team scoped out the legal teams’ requirements and review objectives. They worked with the legal team to define the key geographical regions of interest and mark them out on the map. Overlayed over these maps were the relevant communities and townships impacted in the relevant regions. Using publicly available information, the Sky Discovery team was also able to plot out the relevant spillage and impact zones along with relevant dates. Finally, the relevant images and videos were plotted on the map using coordinate metadata extracted from those files. This custom solution resulted in Sky Maps, which amongst other features, provides an easily navigable and context-rich view of the relevant zones and the events captured within them.

The Sky Discovery team quickly identified which of the images might depict spillage impact by using another one of our award-winning tools, Sky Photo Search. Another tool, Sky Advanced OCR, extracted additional descriptions and coordinates from documents that had that text embedded in the image. These additional data points were also available to be plotted on the relevant maps.

Impact

This unique data visualisation solution allowed our client to:

• Largely automate the mapping of critical data points on a map

• Easily create a context-rich visualisation using varying data inputs

• Quickly understand what images and videos are related to the matter and what parts of the impact zone where being documented and when.