by Steve Burgess | Sep 21, 2026 | AI, Attorneys, Electronic Discovery, Evidence Preservation, Expert Witness Insights, Forensic stories, Humor, Litigation Support, Technology & Law
Deleting the messages was the cheap part. I recently wrote about sanctions: the adverse-inference instruction, the spoliation finding, the judge with disapproval written all over his face telling the jury it may assume the worst about whatever got erased. That’s...
by Steve Burgess | Sep 21, 2026 | Attorneys, Cell phones
Your client wanted an early start. What he handed over was an early Exhibit A. Picture this: he knows he’s under investigation, but he’s anxious, he can’t sleep, and he wants to get ahead of the thing. So, he opens a chatbot at 1 AM and does what...
by Steve Burgess | Sep 8, 2026 | Attorneys, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Electronic Discovery, Technology & Law
The Fourth Amendment walks into the fourth dimension. The bartender says, “Why are you here?” The Fourth Amendment replies, “You’re going to need probable cause to ask me that.” In some of my earlier articles and videos, I referred to a “Fourth Amendment search”...
by Steve Burgess | Aug 31, 2026 | Attorneys, Cell phones, Cyber Investigations, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Electronic Discovery
Your phone has been keeping a travel diary. For years, Google kept a copy too. That made possible one of the more controversial investigative tools of the smartphone era: the geofence warrant, sometimes called a reverse-location warrant. Instead of starting with a...
by Steve Burgess | Aug 24, 2026 | AI, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Expert Witness Insights, Litigation Support
The messages were set to delete within an hour, and some of those settings were changed after a litigation hold had already landed. That was really the whole idea. If you practice long enough, you learn that the tools change but human nature doesn’t. Caveguy Ugg...