Imagine a neighbor’s Ring security camera picks up a figure walking to a front door at 11:47 p.m. Police identify the figure as their suspect, and the prosecutor plans to play the clip for the jury. There is just one problem: that footage never sat on a hard drive. Instead, it streamed through a home Wi-Fi router to Amazon’s cloud servers, where it lived until the homeowner downloaded it to their phone, forwarded it to a detective, and the detective saved it to a department laptop before turning it over to the prosecution. At each step, someone handled the evidence. Nobody documented any of it. That chain of events illustrates the growing authentication problem with Ring doorbell footage, and courts are beginning to notice.

Photo by Tim Büning on Unsplash‍.

In 2024, the aggregate sum of nuclear verdicts—those exceeding $10 million—reached an astonishing total of $31.3 billion. These verdicts are continuing to rise not just in number, but in size and scope. The same year recorded a record-high forty-nine thermonuclear verdicts—those exceeding $100 million—nearly double the twenty-three recorded the year before. Nuclear verdicts are increasing in prevalence across the country, leading to defense attorneys scrambling for solutions to stem the bleeding. On the flip side, plaintiff attorneys have increased both their advertisement presence and demand for jury trials, as social inflation continues to reward lengthy litigation.