Forensic Linguistics Experts: Why the Private Sector is Using Them More than Ever

Forensic Linguistics Experts: Why the Private Sector is Using Them More than Ever

In the world of corporate warfare and private litigation, one of the most effective weapons that can be used is a simple string of words.

Forensic linguistics experts are often called upon to assist law enforcement. They conduct authorship analyses of anonymous and suspect communications, written and spoken, and they help put together criminal profiles. They can also examine writings for indications of motive and connections to prior crimes. You may have even seen forensic linguists on the news, offering their expertise in the wake of mass shootings and other high-profile cases.

That same logic applies to the private sector, as forensic linguistics can offer a decisive advantage to any business looking to protect its intellectual property, reputation, and assets.

Private Sector Uses for Forensic Linguistics Experts

Some of the areas where a forensic linguistics expert can be used in the private sector to secure an advantage for its team and clients, and against competitors, are the following:

• Corporate Human Resources
• Intellectual Property Attorneys
• Estate and Trust Litigators
• Insurance Providers

 
Corporate Human Resources

Anonymous communications can destabilize an entire department, if not the company. These can range from “poison pen” letters to digital harassment to complaints.

When a corporate HR team faces anonymous complaints or other nefarious communications, a forensic linguistics expert can serve as a digital detective.

By analyzing the linguistic fingerprints all authors leave behind, the expert can see if the problematic communications are coming from multiple sources or from one source, possibly someone with an ax to grind. If the writing style matches up with known bad actors within the organization, the perpetrator can be stopped, conflicts can be resolved, and office morale can be restored.

Intellectual Property Attorneys

Trademark disputes often center around “likelihood of confusion.” It is not uncommon to see two companies clash over a similar name or logo. Such battles often come down to sight, sound, and meaning – or, in linguistic terms, orthography, phonetics, and semantics. A forensic linguistics expert can provide a systematic analysis based on scientific principles to strengthen assessments of similarity vs. difference of mark.

In these types of cases, linguistics experts analyze the alphabetic and phonetic distance between marks, such as the pharmaceutical names “Aventis” vs. “Advancis,” as well as the semantic overlap in how customers view these words.

Trademark cases may also involve “strength of mark”: Is a product name distinctive enough to make a good trademark, or does it simply provide a straightforward description of the product? Forensic linguistic experts apply principles of word formation, word meaning, and phrase meaning (morphology and semantics) to assess whether a potential trademark is descriptive of product qualities, or whether it’s more suggestive, requiring a “leap of the imagination” to make a connection between the name and the product. Suggestive trademarks are considered strong and can be protected in court; descriptive marks will face a tougher time in trademark disputes, and generic terms ideally will not be trademarked at all.

“Kettle Chips” was ruled to be generic and not trademarkable (with help from a forensic linguistics expert); conversely, “Booking.com” may look like a generic way of describing online booking sites, but it was ruled to be a valid trademark.

For a company protecting a billion-dollar brand or seeking to stop a rival company from unfairly trademarking a descriptive or generic word, a professional linguistic analysis can make all the difference between preserving and enhancing your company’s good name and having to relinquish valuable intellectual property.

Estate and Trust Litigators

It is not uncommon to see a high-value estate with a contested will. Someone dies, then a long-lost relative surfaces to stake a claim, producing a document that counters the current will. A forensic linguistics expert can assess whether the new document was, in fact, written by the deceased, or whether it more closely matches the writing style of the alleged “relative,” and so it is likely to be a forgery.

Every individual possesses a unique way of using language, an “idiolect,” the product of linguistic exposures, habits, and choices. Age, region, and literacy all come into play, as does the situation – genre, formality, etc. If a will purportedly written by an 80-year-old from Philadelphia includes words and phrases more likely to be found in younger people from the West Coast, then the provenance of the will can be called into question. Conversely, if the new will shows the same language patterns as the original document, including subtle turns of phrase (like “based on” vs. “based upon”), then it may need to be taken seriously as a potentially legally binding will.

Insurance Providers

One reason insurance is so expensive is the billions of dollars in fraud costs this sector incurs annually. Forensic linguist experts may be brought in to examine the verbal “tells” of a claimant’s written statement about the high-value loss.

In cases such as this, forensic linguists look for verbal indicators of potential description, for example, “distancing language” or “hedging.” A story may shift from first person to the third person (for example, from “I” to “the claimant”), or the claimant may use wording that avoids a definitive commitment to the claim (for example, “seems” or “appears to be” vs. “is”). When these suspicious signs are spotted, investigators can dive deeper into the claim. Linguistic analysis of narrative statements also enables the company to process legitimate claims more quickly by focusing its fraud resources on suspect cases.

While the forensic linguist experts on TV get all the glory, the private sector is now making ample use of forensic linguistics experts to improve operations, resolve conflicts, and spot fraud, among other applications.

If you are considering hiring a forensic linguistics expert, please consider Natalie Schilling Consulting. For more information about our services, click here. If you would like to contact us for more information, you can call Dr. Natalie Schilling directly at 202-687-6211 or use our contact form (click here).