by Steve Burgess | Oct 5, 2026 | AI, Attorneys, Cell phones, Cyber Investigations, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics
Your next custodian might not have an inbox, a job title, strong feelings about the office thermostat, or about someone nuking last night’s salmon in the microwave. It might have API access. For the uninitiated, an API is a way for software systems to communicate and...
by Steve Burgess | Sep 28, 2026 | AI, Attorneys, Cell phones, Digital Forensics, Expert Witness Insights, Forensic stories, Shopping Agent, Tech
We have spent years teaching computers to answer our questions, although sometimes it is the other way around. Now we are teaching them to spend our money. The first time an AI shopping agent orders the wrong shoes, nobody will call a lawyer, but the first time it...
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 | 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...
by Steve Burgess | Aug 10, 2026 | AI, Attorneys, Cyber Investigations, Electronic Discovery, Expert Witness Insights, Forensic stories, Humor, iCloud, Litigation Support, Tech, Technology & Law
“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....
by Steve Burgess | Aug 4, 2026 | AI, Attorneys, Cyber Investigations, Expert Witness Insights, Forensic stories, Litigation Support, Malware, Technology & Law
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...
