Informative Articles About Digital Forensics Litigation Support
four part series on electronic data discovery Tools & Your Enterprises
Here is a four part series i found on the internet about Electronic data Discovery (EDD) TOOLS. Michael Osborne has been getting a lot of vendor calls lately pitching a new breed of products, typically called electronic data discovery (EDD) tools. These tools promise to investigate historical data to uncover security breaches, compliance failures and plain old errors in transactions across various enterprise systems, from network administration to accounting. Driven by compliance requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, these tools focus on user activities, such as who accessed a database or updated a customer account. The goal is to look at both real-time and historic patterns across multiple databases, networks and applications to find suspicious activities that might indicate insider financial fraud, customer identity theft, compliance policy breaches or theft of proprietary data such as customer contacts or product designs. As the senior security manager at Kimberly-Clark, which makes health and hygiene products, Osborne is interested in ways to prevent supplier or insider fraud, such as detecting sham providers used to steal or launder money. In other organizations, electronic data discovery tools might be used to detect identity theft or violations of information-access policies. Osborne is not alone in getting these pitches, say analysts and consultants, who warn that CIOs should be cautious. “There’s a lot of vaporware out there,” says Avivah Litan, a security research director…
Read MoreEffective Electronic Discovery: Who, What, Where, When
There are a number of reasons that electronic discovery continues to make news, attorneys and paralegals are demanding standards to govern electronic discovery, and courts around the country are considering (some are already implementing) local rules to change how attorneys manage the electronic portion of discovery in cases. The ABA Task Force on Electronic Discovery, and the Discovery Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on the Rules of Civil Procedure, are inviting public comment and considering options for best practices and possible rules changes. The news media continues to report blunders by companies who haven’t mastered appropriate electronic housekeeping. All this adds up to the conclusion that attorneys and paralegals face a steep learning curve to understand electronic discovery, and then stay current with the continual developments in the area. No matter what your level of electronic discovery expertise, gathering the answers to four simple questions will position you to handle electronic discovery effectively in any case. Who? Whether crafting electronic discovery requests to be served on an opponent, or Examining a document request aimed at your own client, the first step in electronic Discovery is to answer three “who?” questions: Who are the document custodians of interest? Who are the holders of electronic evidence relevant to the issues at hand? and, Who is knowledgeable about how and where electronic documents are created and stored? The answers to these questions will help formulate an…
Read MoreElectronic Discovery Best Practices
I. INTRODUCTION [1] The concept of electronic discovery is still somewhat intimidating to many attorneys, but those who have learned to implement electronic discovery best practices are enjoying the advantages it offers, which include greater control over document review and production processes as well as significant cost reductions. Whether you come to the discovery process as in-house or outside counsel, you can anticipate some of the issues involved in responding to electronic data requests. Pre-review cooperation among in-house counsel, their litigators, and Information Technology (IT) personnel is ideal for planning a successful electronic discovery response. [2] The abundance of electronic information makes pre-litigation planning more important than ever before. Finding and producing information in response to electronic document requests can initially appear to be an enormous undertaking, and a disorganized or untimely response can have disastrous consequences. With preparation and the proper technology, however, the document review and production process can be easier and more efficient than procedures used in the “paper world.” Counsel can streamline discovery response, minimize its impact upon ongoing business operations, reduce costs of review and production, and gain a strategic advantage in the process. Proper planning among corporate counsel, IT departments, and outside counsel integrates preparation for discovery with daily operations. Rather than experience a crisis when litigation arises, corporate management and its counsel are instead ready to respond, leveraging the advantages of electronic discovery. II. DISCOVERABILITY OF…
Read MoreDon’t let electronic evidence bury your firm
By Sharon D. Nelson, Esq. and John W. Simek Electronic Evidence How vastly the world has changed in the past decade. Today, more than 90 percent of our documents are electronic and most never will be converted to paper. We send e-mails at a frenzied pace — North America alone transmits more than 4 trillion e-mails a day. The daily average of non-spam e-mails received by the average worker is 20 to 80. No longer does the word “documents” in discovery mean paper documents. The definition of document has been universally expanded to include electronic files. With increasing frequency, the pivotal evidence in cases is electronic and can show up in two places you might not think of. First are in those e-mails we dash off with such abandon and so little thought. You should hit that “Send” button only if: 1) it’s OK to see your e-mail on the front page of The New York Times; 2) you don’t mind if your entire neighborhood sees it on a bulletin board on your nearest highway; 3) it would be perfectly agreeable for your mom to read it; and 4) if you have considered whether the transmission of the message could ever come back and bite you in the tush in a courtroom. Another source of pivotal evidence many lawyers and paralegals are blithely unaware of is metadata (hidden data showing things such…
Read MoreDoing E-Discovery Is Best Left to Outside Experts
Hunton & Williams has 17 offices for its Richmond, Va.-based firm, with one central litigation support center for helping its lawyers with their caseloads. That center is a 10,000-square-foot facility with between 35 and 40 staffers who handle complicated tasks, and that increasingly has meant collecting, sorting and analyzing electronic evidence. Hunton is rare in that it does electronic discovery in-house. However, even this firm does not handle all of its own workload for e-discovery issues. For really big or complicated cases, the firm will turn over evidence to e-discovery consultants. In the paper world, discovery was something law firms did themselves. When it comes to electronic discovery, however, firms need to have a certain amount of inhouse expertise, but most will probably find e-discovery is best left to outsiders. “We make arrangements with outside vendors whenever we need to,” says Sherry Harris, senior case management specialist with Hunton.
Read MoreHow to Avoid Common Pitfalls
Over the past few years, many multinational companies, and the law firms that service them, have made a concentrated effort to control the management of data created, stored, or sent overseas. It is no easy task. An estimated 99 percent of new information is stored electronically, mostly on computer hard disk. This is a tremendous amount of data considering that a company’s primary day-to-day contact with its own foreign executives may be conducted through e-mails, instant messaging, online video conferencing,or other forms of electronic communications. In the United States, a burgeoning body of case law has brought e-discovery out of the hands of a few tech savvy lawyers and introduced an entirely new element to civil discovery to a growing number of practitioners. Counsel that ignores the pronouncements of Zubulake v. UBS Warburg may be dealt a heavy blow at trial and on appeal. In addition, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure incorporate several amendments dealing specifically with e-discovery.
Read MoreMaking Forensics Elementary at Your Firm
The electronic-discovery phenomenon is here to stay — and the industry is still exploding. The percentage of electronically-stored-information evidence in the standard case has increased exponentially, and all signs on the information superhighway and on roads leading to court indicate that ESI in litigation will escalate as time goes by. Along with e-discovery, the field of computer forensics is becoming evermore central to the discovery process. The need for computer forensics analysis is appearing frequently at the state and federal level, and the field’s influence and demands are permeating civil and criminal cases, both large and small. Attorney and e-discovery expert Tom O’Connor, with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Legal Electronic Document Institute, says that judges in the cases he consults on are ordering e-discovery and computer-forensics investigation much more frequently than ever before. O’Connor is seeing the effect of this change on all kinds of cases. “Even a small business has a 20 GB hard drive these days,” he notes. “We can’t think of e-discovery as an issue only relevant to large or complex litigation anymore. Nearly everyone has at least one computer at work and one at home, not to mention a cell phone, PDA, GPS system and wireless Internet connection. With all these potential evidence sources for each individual, it’s no wonder that the amount of electronic evidence to be vetted is skyrocketing.” O’Connor adds that with large criminal cases, huge…
Read MoreComputer Forensics & Data Preservation
Court-appointed trustees and receivers, or fiduciaries, identify, recover and evaluate assets and historical financial information. They are aided by a team of professionals, including attorneys, accountants, financial advisors, appraisers, investment bankers and others, depending on the nature of the matter. In the past, this meant sifting through reams of paper records and issuing subpoenas for bank records and other documents. Today, about 93 percent of information is electronically created, according to a University of California, Berkeley, study. And with as much as 50 percent of data created electronically never being printed, fiduciaries might miss vital information when relying on conventional discovery alone. Computer forensics professionals work as part of a fiduciary’s team by taking data preservation and network security actions to preserve relevant business records, including financial information and email. They are able to identify what information is available, where it is located and in what form it is stored. For example, computer forensics examiners can find email, word processing documents and spreadsheets residing in workstations, laptops, servers, backup tapes and portable storage, including external hard drives, Mp3 players and cell phones. In addition, they can find other critical data in antiquated business applications, phone systems and closed-circuit surveillance systems. First, this information must be secured to prevent it from being destroyed remotely or otherwise purged. Once critical data has been identified for preservation, computer forensics examiners can create exact copies of the…
Read MoreSeparating E-Discovery Myths from Realities
By Conrad J. Jacoby, Esq. As the legal community continues to puzzle through the impact that digital information is having on the practice of law, many practitioners are guided by long-standing misconceptions and misunderstandings about electronic discovery. Whatever seed of truth exists in these platitudes, taking them at face value can lead to poor strategic decisions that limit the effectiveness of otherwise competent legal advice. Several particular “rules of thumb” seem particularly common in the legal community, even with extensive education efforts. Myth: E-Discovery Is Now Required In Every Case Reality: False. Since December 1, 2006, discovery of electronically stored information (“ESI”) has been a mandatory topic of conversation in every federal case and in an increasing number of state court matters. However, simply discussing e-discovery doesn’t materially change the basis for a legal claim or the factual evidence that supports or disproves the case. While individuals and businesses alike rely on computers for many reasons, e-discovery comes into play only when relevant information is stored digitally. In some situations, even though electronic evidence is available, it may be possible to resolve a dispute based on other evidence. Such an analysis is necessarily case specific, and the outcome is never a foregone conclusion, because so much useful information is often found in electronic evidence. However, situations can occur in which electronic evidence is strategically less important than other evidence. For example, in…
Read MoreE-Discovery: The Times, They Are A Changing
Fasten your seatbelts legal mavens – in less than six months electronic discovery as we know it will undergo some important changes. These changes are being driven by amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that become effective on December 1, 2006. While one of the intentions behind these changes is to reduce litigation costs, it very well may be that electronic discovery costs will increase as a result of the amendments, especially with respect to work that must be performed within the first 120 days after a lawsuit has commenced. Under amendments to FRCP 16(b), parties must get ready for a scheduling conference to consider electronic discovery plans within 120 days of the start of a lawsuit. And, at least 21 days before this scheduling conference, parties must meet and confer to discuss and try to agree upon electronic discovery procedures for the case, pursuant to FRCP 26(f). This means that parties must be formulating their electronic discovery plans within the first 100 days of the life of a case. While the purpose of these new rules is to provide early structure, uniformity and predictability, the reality is that right from the get-go of a lawsuit a party must start evaluating with its IT team and its outside counsel where it stands in terms of its own electronic data. Data can be located live on the network, on various servers,…
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