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 | Sep 8, 2026 | Attorneys, Digital Evidence, Digital Forensics, Electronic Discovery, Technology & Law
The Fourth Amendment walks into the fourth dimension. The bartender says, “Why are you here?” The Fourth Amendment replies, “You’re going to need probable cause to ask me that.” In some of my earlier articles and videos, I referred to a “Fourth Amendment search”...
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...
