Informative Articles About Digital Forensics Litigation Support
Importance Of Recovery Planning
Disasters are common in the world today, from nature to car wrecks. In the computer industry, disasters aren’t any different. They can come in the form of an office fire, computer crashes, hard drive failure, missing IT documents, stolen hardware, and many other forms. Disasters can be very traumatic and stressful, although there are actions that you can take. Even though disasters can occur at any time, recovery planning doesn’t cross the mind of business owners or individuals. Most just carry out their normal day to day routines, never aware of what could result from a disaster. Then, when disaster does strike, most tend to freak out and wonder just what they can do to fix the situation at hand. If you are prepared for a disaster or hard drive failure, then your business will be able to deal with anything that happens. The first step in planning and preparing for disaster is to analyze your business or operations. You should determine how often your systems go down, and how you can manage operations without the equipment. You should also find out how long it would take you to fix the equipment, and what your business can do to make ends meet when the equipment is unavailable.
Read MoreRising Costs of E-Discovery Requirements Impacting Litigants
The first electronic database I supervised in litigation ended up costing a dollar a page. And that was before a single lawyer had looked at any of it. Making TIFF images, using Optical Character Recognition software to create searchable text, entering basic descriptive coding for each document and exporting all this data into a usable format were handled by an outside vendor that charged separately for each step. This was actually cheap, because we started with paper documents, not dozens of hard drives and servers full of e-mail, Word files, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets that first had to be forensically imaged and treated like evidence at a homicide scene on “CSI: Miami.” Luckily, my client was a major corporation facing claims that its opponents contended were worth many millions of dollars. The client could afford this cost, and the database created ultimately paid for itself by allowing us to find documents that changed the direction of the case. But we built this database by choice, not in response to our opponent’s demand. The client wanted to preserve all the relevant documents and retrieve them quickly and decided the cost was worth it. Since that time, the discovery landscape has evolved. Even before the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required all parties to include electronically stored information — ESI for short — in their mandatory disclosures and early discovery planning, lawyers learned…
Read MoreControlling the Accidental Release of Digital Information
In an age when virtually all documents are created on computers, it has become second nature to electronically share these materials through e-mail, extranets, and USB flash drives. Unfortunately, many people don’t fully understand exactly what information is contained in the files they are distributing. In the legal community, where clients routinely entrust sensitive and privileged information to their legal counsel, this lack of understanding can have significant consequences. Imagine how you would feel if you were counsel in any of these situations: In a products liability matter, both parties have been ordered by the court to exchange final trial exhibit lists in electronic format, such as an Excel spreadsheet. Rather than e-mail the file, your trusted paralegal copies the file onto a floppy disk that he sends via FedEx. Several days later, your opposing counsel acknowledges receipt of your exhibit list, but he also notes that the floppy disk contained an unrelated database apparently relating to another litigation matter on which you are also working. Have you just waived work product privilege on that work?
Read MoreDefining A Standard for Admitting Electronic Evidence at Trial
While many attorneys and their clients focus on the importance of preserving electronic files and data to minimize the risk of evidence spoliation, far fewer give the same attention to the seemingly straight-forward process of validating these materials for admission into evidence. One inadvertent result is that while standards for resolving electronic evidence spoliation allegations have been constantly tested and improved through a combination of articulate judicial decisions, specific procedural rules, and extensive commentary by legal scholars, far fewer written opinions have squarely addressed the standards for the admissibility of electronic evidence, leaving a much smaller pool of resources from which to draw guidance. A recent Ninth Circuit case demonstrates the degree to which standards for the admissibility of electronic evidence admissibility remain unsettled and open to significant variation. In re Vinhnee, 2005 WL 3609376, 06 Cal. Daily Op. Serv. 146, 2006 Daily Journal D.A.R. 169 (B.A.P. 9th Cir. Dec 16, 2005), stands (among other things) for the proposition that a sponsoring party cannot rely upon judicial notice to fill gaps in the explicit foundation that it uses to authenticate electronic materials it wishes to introduce as evidence.
Read MoreFinding the Line Between E-Discovery Expert and Fact Witness Testimony
Digital information is an increasingly common part of civil and criminal litigation. Electronic mail messages and documents-or evidence that such materials are suspiciously missing-are powerfully persuasive pieces of evidence that can make or break a case. Courts recognize the importance of electronic files and their analysis, and they routinely admit such materials into evidence. However, where is the point where relaying objective facts about electronic documents crosses the line into expert opinion testimony? The Sixth Circuit case, United States v. Ganier, 468 F.3d 920 (6th Cir. 2006), recently addressed exactly that issue. In a criminal matter, the prosecution announced its intention to present the testimony of an IRS agent regarding evidence that potentially relevant files had been located by running queries using Microsoft Windows utilities-and then deleted.
Read MoreAn introduction to Computer Forensics
Computer Forensics is the process of investigating electronic devices or computer media for the purpose of discovering and analyzing available, deleted, or “hidden” information that may serve as useful evidence in supporting both claims and defenses of a legal matter as well as it can helpful when data have been accidentally deleted or lost due to hardware failure. This is a very old technique but now it has changed a lot because of technological advances & modern tools and software’s. which makes Computer Forensics much easier for Computer Forensic Experts to find & restore more evidence or data, faster and with more accuracy . Computer forensics is done Using advanced techniques and technologies, a computer forensic expert uses this techniques to discover evidence from a electronic storage device for a possible crime . The data can be from any kind of electronic device like Pen drives , discs, tapes, handhelds, PDAs, memory stick, Emails, logs, hidden or deleted files etc…. Most of us think that a deleting a file or history will remove it completely from the hard disk drive. But in realty it only removes the file from the location, but the actual file will still remain on your computer. It is easier to track what has been done on your computer but difficult to say by whom . Although it’s possible to alter or delete the data completely from your storage…
Read MoreHow Data Recovery Could Become Critical For Business Survival And What To Do In Case Of Data Loss
A Scenario of What Could Happen Just imagine this scenario. You own a highly profitable specialty retail store that stock thousands of parts. These parts are procured from the best sources that you have identified over many years, based on product quality, timely deliveries, reasonable prices and customer support. You have also fixed the re-order levels based on years of experience. These re-order levels are the basis for automatically triggering replenishment requests when the stock of a part reaches danger levels. All the data, parts specifications, selling prices, supplier details, inventory accounts, re-order levels, consumption statistics, negotiated prices and other such critical information are stored in your computer system at the back office. You do back up these data onto magnetic tapes. However you have never checked the reliability of these backup tapes. One day, during a severe thunderstorm, your computer disks become unreadable. And you find that the backup tapes have become unreliable with the restored data being no better than useless garbage. Now imagine the disastrous impact such data loss could have on your business operations and profitability. You might be able to reconstruct the part specifications and selling prices from paper records. However, re-identifying the preferred suppliers, the replenishment stock levels and negotiated prices for each of the thousands of parts might prove a highly disruptive exercise, if at all possible. The result would be a serious loss of control…
Read MoreElectronic Discovery-Why aren’t more law firms using it
As the technology age creeps upon us and forces us reevaluate our personal lives in everything that we do, the same can be said for how lawyers practice. Partners who have been tied to their pen and paper presentations are now being confronted with a phenomenon that has started to pick up speed since the early 90’s- Electronic Discovery Requests. In the general practice of law, opposing counsels will ask for relevant and pertinent data from each other under the aegis of full disclosure. But what happens when this information is contained on someone’s computer, more specifically an email, word document, or even an excel spreadsheet? Precisely, many lawyers do NOT know what to do. This is where the niche practitioners of the field of electronic discovery come into place. These consultants and technologists assist lawyers and firms every day with their electronic discovery needs. From assisting with drafting proper discovery requests, to helping the firm understand how to deal with electronic discovery vendors to process their information, it truly is a growing field in this day and age.So why is it that many law firms are not up to speed on this segment of practice. For many firms, there is no necessity yet to embrace this technology. But that will change in the near future as more opposing counsels levy electronic discovery requests against them to fulfill. Courts are starting to require…
Read MoreImplementing Threats, Risk And Security Audits
People used to close business deals with a handshake. They looked one another in the eye. Today, more and more transactions are electronic, anonymous and, in too many cases, fraudulent. Any organization that stores or moves important information on an electronic network is putting its information at risk. A criminal on the other side of the world or an apparently loyal employee may have the ability to wreak havoc, by stealing, deleting or exposing confidential information. The Computer Crime and Security Survey, conducted by the Computer Security Institute and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, indicates almost two-thirds of the large corporations and government agencies it surveyed lost money when their computer security broke down. The survey noted that 9 out of 10 respondents had computer security breaches during the previous 12 months. Proprietary information worth $170.8 million was stolen from 41 respondents. Fraud cost 40 respondents $115.8 million. When only 45 per cent of executives in North America said they conduct security audits on their e-commerce systems, (around the world, fewer than 35 per cent had conducted security audits) it becomes obvious that organizations must improve their defenses quickly. The first step in protecting information assets is a Threat and Risk Assessment (TRA). Without the information it provides, organizations are in danger of fixing only what is broken and ignoring potential hazards. While the specifics of a TRA will be unique at each…
Read MoreSolving Crime With Computer Forensics
Computer Forensics is the scientific study of computers or computer related data in relation to an investigation by a law enforcement agency for use in a court of law. While this technology may be as old as computers themselves, the advances in technology are constantly revising this science. In the technological old days, computer forensics was mostly related to data dumps, printing out every keystroke that had been logged on a computer in a series of eight digits, all of them zeroes and ones. Literally cases of paper would be used for the printing of the materials. Systems analysts would then have to convert all of the data into hex and then translate the value into whatever the actual keystroke was. In this way, it was possible to go over all of the data and figure out at what point the computer and the corresponding program crashed. Like computers and technology, Computer forensics has evolved by leaps and bounds since those days of old. While all computer language still ultimately boils down to ones and zeroes or binary and then hex, the means by which programs are created, run and utilized has changed drastically. This new science has done well to keep up with the task at hand. Now hard drives can be wiped clean. However, without an unconditional format (and in rare cases, even with the unconditional switch) the data can still…
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