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 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 21, 2026 | Attorneuys, Attorneys, Cell phones, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Expert Witness Insights, Forensic stories, Litigation Support, Technology & Law, Uncategorized
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,...
by Steve Burgess | Sep 4, 2022 | Forensic stories
Printers and Copiers Left Out of the FBI’s Search of Trump’s Mar-A-Lago copyright, 2022, Steve Burgess We’ve only recently learned the content of the search warrant that the FBI used to search the premises of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort and...
