Advanced Discovery, a global eDiscovery and risk management provider, has filed a patent covering facial recognition technology in eDiscovery workflows. This most recent patent is designed to automate the review of large volumes of photographic images to identify an individual’s presence and prioritise documents within document reviews.

Consider this scenario described in a recent Forbes blog post: “Every quarter, a PR department receives the final quarterly financial numbers via email ahead of the earnings announcement in order to prepare a press release. The PR draft will be shared via email by a select group within the company before being approved and ready to be distributed out on the news wires. When pulling that financial information from the ERP system - a system that usually lives behind the corporate firewall with strong security and identity controls in place and with business owners who govern access to the systems and data within - we’ve instantly taken that formerly safe data and shared it freely by email as an Excel file.”