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Text Messages as Evidence: Harder Than You Think
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...
Digital Evidence 101: What Every Attorney Should Know Before Discovery
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...
Digital Privacy vs. Discovery: Where the Line Is Drawn
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....
The 3 Phone Mistakes That Destroy Digital Evidence Before Trial
Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess Smartphones are the single richest source of digital evidence in most litigation today. Text messages, call logs, photos, location history, app data, deleted files — it's all there, sitting in a device that fits in a shirt pocket. Or in...
Your Preservation Letter Is Missing These 6 Data Sources
I’m sure that you have reviewed a lot of preservation letters. Some of them are excellent — thorough, specific, and sent at exactly the right moment. Others read like they were written in 1997 and then never updated, which, in fairness, some of them were. Still others...
Deleted Does Not Always Mean Gone (But It Doesn’t Mean Recoverable Either)
(copyright Steve Burgess 2026) One of my favorite client conversations goes something like this: Client: “I deleted it.” Attorney: “Can you get it back?” Forensic examiner: “…define ‘it.’” Television has taught us two completely opposite and equally wrong ideas:...
Digital Evidence Is Bigger Than Most Cases Realize
Digital Evidence Is Bigger Than Most Cases Realize copyright Steve Burgess 2026 There’s a scene in television forensics that appears in approximately 94.27% of all episodes. Someone in a dark room says, “Pull up the computer.” Then ten seconds later, another person...
Metadata as a Silent Witness: What It Can Reveal About Your Case
Metadata as a Silent Witness: What It Can Reveal About Your Case Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess Every digital file has two stories to tell. The first is the one you can read — the contract, the email, the photograph. The second story is invisible, buried in the file...
Where Critical Evidence Hides: Email, Texts, & Cloud Data Part II
Email, Texts, & Cloud Data: Where Critical Evidence Hides, Part II Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess In over four decades of digital forensics work, I've examined more than 20,000 devices and pieces of digital evidence. And in that time I've developed a...
Can You Trust What You See? The Rise of Deepfakes and What It Means for Justice
Can You Trust What You See? The Rise of Deepfakes and What It Means for Justice Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess I've been working with digital evidence since 1985, and I've seen a lot of changes. Back then, the biggest challenge was recovering data from a 10 MB hard...