Legal Technologies
Legal technologies is a range of services provided to clients that are party to a legal dispute, and concern the access to data or documents that may be used as evidence to support one case or the other.
The generally accepted divisions within legal technologies are Computer Forensics and Electronic Discovery, (‘Disclosure’ in England & Wales).
Computer Forensics is a service provided to clients, (through the advice of lawyers), where evidence is required as to who did what, when and how with a computer system. Often system data will need to be investigated and interpreted to show who did what and when. Also it is a very common requirement that ‘deleted’ data be recovered, whether this be system data, or file data.
E.g. A person leaves an organisation to set up a competing business. Before leaving the person forwards client lists or other pieces of intellectual property to their Hotmail account, ready for access from their home. The CF investigator shows that this process took place by investigating the person’s original computer system and an injunction is sought to prevent that data’s use.
Electronic Discovery is a service provided to clients that are under a duty to make a reasonable search of their documents in the course of litigation. Part 31 of the Civil Procedure Rules classes electronic files, emails etc as documents that must be searched to find relevant documents that will need to be disclosed to the other side, and made ready for inspection.
Most businesses now store the vast majority of their documents and communications in an electronic form. Email is the predominate form of communication in commerce. As a result of a lack of automated filing technologies, most documents are stored in a random fashion, and are stored for a very long time. This leads to billions of documents being potentially required for disclosure. eDiscovery is the process of gathering all these potentially relevant documents, (usually from backup tapes), and sifting them against key words and custodians/authors, to narrow the data universe to a manageable level for review by lawyers.
E.g. A 40Gb backup tape from an email server may contain so many emails that it would be impossible to print and review them all. Printing this level of data to 80gm/m2 paper would require somewhere in the region of 20 metric tons of paper and might produce somewhere in the region of 4 million documents that would need to be read. It is not uncommon for 20 such backup tapes to be involved in a disclosure project.
See also:
>> Palmer Data Recovery