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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...
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...