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...
by Steve Burgess | Aug 3, 2026 | AI, Attorneys, Cell phones, Cyber Investigations, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Electronic Discovery, Expert Witness Insights, Forensic stories, Litigation Support, Technology & Law
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...
by Steve Burgess | Jul 30, 2026 | Attorneys, Cell phones, Cyber Investigations, Litigation Support, Technology & Law
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...
by Steve Burgess | Jul 14, 2026 | AI, Attorneys, Cell phones, Cyber Investigations, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Electronic Discovery, Litigation Support, Technology & Law
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...
by Steve Burgess | Jul 7, 2026 | Attorneys, Cyber Investigations, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Electronic Discovery, Evidence Preservation, Expert Witness Insights, Litigation Support, Technology & Law
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...
