Digital Forensics for Business Litigation
Digital forensics plays an increasingly larger role in business litigation. Typically, you need to collect evidence from computers, cell phones, servers, and email accounts. Also, the data is often held in more than one place. For example, there are three ways we can collect mobile phone evidence:
- Directly from the mobile phone.
- From cell phone backups on a computer.
- From cell phone backups on a cloud service, like iCloud.
Preserving Evidence to use in Court
With all the time and effort that goes into eDiscovery, we ensure your evidence remains admissible in court. Our forensic software and collection practices are fully defensible. For example, we always maintain chain of custody and preserve the integrity of the evidence for your business litigation.
Our Forensics Reduce your Business Litigation Costs
Once we’ve identified all sources of evidence, we forensically extract the images, videos, text messages, call logs, notes, voicemail, and application data. You can imagine that quickly becomes an overwhelming amount of items to sort through. For your business litigation, our forensics expert will work with you to develop a Discovery Protocol and apply effective culling strategies. This way we reduce the amount of data and by extension, your eDiscovery costs.
For example, we focus the review on certain timeframes with begin and end-date filters, or to only those messages sent or received from certain people. In addition, our forensic analyst will also work with you to exclude other items, such as:
- Confidential Information. Protect your client’s relationship with their employer. We will cull to avoid accidentally producing electronic evidence with confidential information such as intellectual property or trade secrets to the other party or the court.
- Privileged Communications. For obvious reasons, we also cull all attorney-client communications or other privileged messages.
After reducing the amount of data, we produce evidence in one of two platforms. We will produce for you the relevant, non-privileged electronic evidence in either: In-House Document Review Software for electronic evidence, or in a convenient Desktop Evidence Report. The size of your case and the volume of data will indicate the platform that is best for you. Read more about either of those here.
Do you work for only one party in the lawsuit?
We can work for one or both parties in your business litigation. As an expert witness, we work with only one party in the litigation. However, if both sides agree, we can work as a Neutral Third-Party Expert. The latter solution tends to be more collaborative and cost-effective. We help the parties establish a protocol, and then we collect the evidence for both sides, cull out any attorney-client privileged communications, and exchange the data between the parties. Who pays our fee is negotiated between the parties (usually split 50/50). Read more about our expert services here.
Read more here: Business Litigation FAQs