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 17, 2026 | Attorneys, Cell phones, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Elder Abuse, Electronic Discovery, Expert Witness Insights, Litigation Support
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...
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...
