Computer Forensics, Electronic Discovery & Expert Witness
“It’s encrypted, so I guess we’re just out of luck.” I hear some version of that from attorneys and other clients more often than you’d think, usually said with a kind of resigned finality, as though the phone in evidence had sealed itself inside a block of concrete. Sometimes it’s true (well, not the part [ ] The post Encrypted Doesn’t Mean Untouchable: What Attorneys Should Know About Device…
You thought you sent a one-page letter. What you actually sent was a one-page letter and a small pile of paperwork the letter filled out about itself when you weren t looking. That paperwork is metadata — data about data. And it travels with your files whether or not you invited it along for the trip. [ ] The post The Metadata You Didn t Know You Were Sending appeared first on Burgess Forensics .
The format language in a discovery request is easy to skip over. It looks like boilerplate. It reads like boilerplate. It is actually boilerplate. And so it gets waved through: produce as PDF, that s fine. Maybe not so fine when that same attorney later pays me to explain why the file on my screen can t [ ] The post Native Files vs. PDFs: Why Discovery Format Fights Are Worth Having appeared first…
When a client or opposing party says he deleted everything, attorneys often hear a dead end. I hear the opposite and you probably should as well. In digital forensics, deletion is rarely the end of the story. In fact, it may be the beginning of a better one. What most people don’t understand is that [ ] The post Why He Deleted Everything Is Usually Good News for Your Case appeared first on Burgess…
A fitness tracker once told me the exact moment its wearer stopped moving. Not slowed down. Stopped. The device wasn t built to establish a time of death. It was builtto count steps and nag its owner about standing up more often. But it kept a continuous record, and that record answered a question nobody had [ ] The post Your Smart Home Is Testifying Against You appeared first on Burgess Forensics…
Twenty years ago, a forensic report about a hard drive was mostly an argument about whether a file existed and when it was last touched. And of course, trying to recover deleted material. Today the same report might need to address whether a video is real, whether a document was generated by a language model, [ ] The post The Future of Expert Testimony in a Digital World appeared first on Burgess…
Your client didn t leak anything on purpose. That s usually how it goes. The confidential settlement number, the internal complaint about a coworker, the photo that was supposed to prove they were out of town — all of it can arrive at opposing counsel s desk wrapped in a bow, because nobody thought to ask what was [ ] The post The Metadata Your Client Is Accidentally Sending to Opposing Counsel…
Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess Somewhere along the way, text messages became some of the most important evidence in litigation that nobody quite knows how to handle properly. A few years ago, that would have been an email thread, such as in the Case of the Computer That Got Lost. But in family law and other [ ] The post Text Messages as Evidence: Harder Than You Think appeared first on Burgess…
Digital Evidence 101: What Every Attorney Should Know Before Discovery Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess I ve sat across the table or more recently, the Zoom from a great many attorneys over the past forty years, and I ve noticed a pattern. Litigators who can cross-examine a hostile witness into a confused puddle, who can recite [ ] The post Digital Evidence 101: What Every Attorney Should Know Before…
Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess Every so often I’ll sit across the Zoom from an attorney—or from a pro se litigant—who wants everything. Every text message the opposing party has ever sent. Every photo on their phone. Every search query. Every deleted file. Every app. Every cloud account. Of course, I’ve also had those calls where [ ] The post Digital Privacy vs. Discovery: Where the Line Is Drawn…