Blog
What Happens to Your Digital Life When You Die (And Who Can Access It)
By Steve Burgess, Burgess Forensics, 2026 “He passed last month, and his whole life is locked inside his phone. Can’t you just get in?” I hear some version of that rather often —more than you might think, in fact. The request comes from grieving families, from...
Encrypted Doesn’t Mean Untouchable: What Attorneys Should Know About Device Access
“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....
The Metadata You Didn’t Know You Were Sending
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...
Native Files vs. PDFs: Why Discovery Format Fights Are Worth Having
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...
Why “He Deleted Everything” Is Usually Good News for Your Case
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...
Your Smart Home Is Testifying Against You
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...
The Future of Expert Testimony in a Digital World
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...
The Metadata Your Client Is Accidentally Sending to Opposing Counsel
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...
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...