#LegalHack Emojis 💻⚖🤔✨

Over 6 billion emojis are sent each day, and within the past year, emojis have begun finding their way into criminal cases as vital evidence because of their semantic value. Emojis present difficulties for attorneys because they can't be identified via keyword searches, and producing the rendered images is both technically challenging with existing software but also highly subjective due to the device-specific emojis used. This talk will explore some of the challenges and highlight several of the key cases from the past year. The talk will also discuss strategies attorneys are using to tackle these challenges, as well as where we see this issue heading over the next several years.

Speakers include:

• Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, is a technology/climate journalist who covers the emoji beat. 📝

• Gabriella Ziccarelli, Blank Rome, has written on emoji-related legal issues. ⚖

• Joe Sremack, Boxer Analytics and Unicode Consortium member, spends way too much time analyzing emoji modifiers and surrogate pairs. 🎛

UPDATE: 🍻 + 🍋-ade + perhaps emoji themed snacks will be in the house!

Schedule:

​6:30 - Drinks and Networking

7:00 - DC Legal Hackers Intro and Announcements

7:10 - Emoji Intro (Robinson Meyer)

7:15 - Presentation (Gabriella Ziccarelli)

7:30 - Presentation (Joe Sremack)

7:45-8:30 - Panel and Discussion (moderated by Robinson Meyer)

​8:45 Fin/Clean Up​