Forensic Handwriting Analysis

Although handwritten documents have become rarer in the digital age, the authenticity of a piece of handwritten evidence occasionally becomes critical. In a recent case, I suspected a document had been forged. I had writing samples from the suspect and the suspicious documents. My initial approach entailed isolating all the words and letters in each document to compare their similarity. While useful, this approach was time-consuming and failed to provide any metrics. As a deep tech lawyer, I adopted a software-based approach that utilized computer vision. While the most advanced handwriting forensic tools are reserved for law enforcement agencies, Dr. Hussein Mohammed of Universität Hamburg produced an open-source software, HAT3.5, that proved to be an effective solution for a data-driven handwriting analysis. The software analyzes handwriting styles and then calculates a similarity score with the unknown document, which can be highly persuasive. This is just one example of how lawyers can utilize powerful tools to practice data-driven law.