Technology is present in every aspect of modern life and it is constantly growing & nowadays business communications are done using electronic storage devices like emails, flash drives, hard drives etc. Surveys shows that more than 85 percent of all documents produced since 2000 are created in digital form. As the technology is growing, a lot of people are exploiting these technological advances for illegal activities. Most of the time e-discovery is used in cases of intellectual property theft, sexual harassment in the workplace, fraud, breach of contract, divorce proceedings and spoliation of evidence. Here comes the Electronic data discovery which is quickly becoming the mainstream in civil discovery. But still many attorneys are taking it seriously and some of them fail to do e-discovery. The main reason is cost & time. It is true that Electronic data discovery or also called as Electronic evidence discovery is complicated & time consuming procedure but compared to conventional methods Electronic discovery is cost effective & less time consuming. Because of the technological advances, there are lots of new ways & tools which allow safe recovery of evidence which is normally undetectable by human eyes. A few years ago this used to cost tens of thousands of dollars for Electronic data discovery but now using new computer forensic techniques, a computer forensic expert can do it as low as five thousand dollars. Law firms are now looking for computer-generated evidence in most of the cases related to sexual harassment in the workplace, fraud, defamation, trade secret, divorce proceedings etc. There is a huge amount of electronic data that can be collected & stored to use it as evidence in court.
It is really important to know where to get professional help not just in case of electronic discovery but in any thing you do. Seeing the growing demand for electronic discovery consultants, computer forensic investigators, and litigation support services, law firms are now including all this in their list of services. A professional electronic discovery consultant can help you make effective plan for recovering & storing the evidence accurately without any loss of relevant electronic evidence. Electronic discovery consultant’s services include preparing discovery requests related to electronic documents, evaluating discovery responses and assisting in the evidence recovery, analyzing and producing of relevant electronic data in the court.
Usually it may take weeks for a civil litigant to get access to opponent's computer systems after protests, unlike government investigators who can seize & access immediately without any advance notice. Best thing to do while hiring an e-discovery consultant is to hire one who is an attorney with litigation experience and expert in computer forensics. So he can avoid needless objections and motions and save time too. Once an electronic discovery plan is created, its time for electronic discovery expert to see what types of relevant evidence might be found and other things like:
Computer Network Configuration
Software’s In Use
Document Retention Policies
Data Backup And Storage Locations
And the person who controls about the computer network.
After knowing about all these in detail, a document production request can be carefully crafted. If it is found that the evidence may exist in digital form then a computer forensic examiner will collect evidence from all possible places. A computer forensics expert first creates a backup of all data contained on the targeted computer or electronic device in order to prove that it has not been altered during the examination process. Once the backup is completed and mirror image is created, computer forensic examiner searches & analyze computer files without altering date stamps or other information because file date stamp (file creation date, last modified, or last accessed) is a vital piece of evidence . Depending on the volume of evidence to be produced, counsel may need help of a litigation support service to help in the conversion, scanning, coding and indexing of the electronic evidence collected.
In today's legal discovery world, electronically stored information requires special attention in litigation. The recent emphasis on producing electronically stored information requires an e-discovery team to apply legal principles to information technology. But electronically stored information in some cases drive them out of business, especially in companies as they are unaware to find electronically stored information, especially Email and associated attachments. Most email discovery efforts relate to the collection and review of Email as they remain one of the highest risk areas.
Email is most popularly used by all the people for communication of personal or business related matters. Currently more than 1000 million Email accounts are in use Worldwide, with an average of more than 4 Email accounts per person. With the Email accounts, all your incoming, saved, and sent mail is stored on a mail server with in IMAP folders. As we know we all rely on Email to operate our businesses in our personal lives, it is important to take preventive measures to avoid the ultimate disaster of unrecoverable Email.
The message index in the Email s lists the messages and is stored as entries in a database associated with the file structure. When you delete mail messages the attachments of the deleted file are also deleted as well. How ever you can restore them as they are only moved to a special deleted message folder called Trash folder, like the files in Recycle bin. These deleted Email s still remain on a computer hard drive, servers or retained on back-up tapes.
After deleting the Email from the folder, it reduces the size of the database file by eliminating this vacant space. Once they get deleted they restore it in the trash folder, which can be easily retrieved. These files are not removed from an index of the files, they just move to the trash directory and the space is considered to be available for writing new data.
But if an Email in the trash folder is deleted again then it is no longer indexed and no longer readily accessible. But these files are not truly deleted; they still exist on your hard drive. These deleted files have not been erased, but in most of the cases they can be easily retrieved. To retrieve the data from the trash files, forensic examination is required to locate and retrieve them. In some circumstances, these mails may be impossible to retrieve from the server, hard drive or pc because they have been overwritten by other files.
Even if your Email is completely lost, then these mail recovery tools are used to scan the entire hard disk, locate and recovers the deleted Email and also repairs the database if it is corrupted.
Imagine your Email database deleted or the file system corrupted. If that happens, you would need an undelete tool to get the files back. Though the database becomes corrupted, the data content may still exist, but the structure of the file may be wrong such that the mail cannot list the messages. Then you need to use email discovery tools typically to scan your hard disk and list a whole bunch of files with damaged, crippled file names.
As different mail programs store data in different formats like word, Excel, csv, pdfs etc, you must use a data recovery tool that supports the mail software you are using. For Outlook Express or Windows Mail, Mail Recovery is effective and easy to use, For Microsoft outlook files to recover, you need Outlook recovery, and for Mozilla thunderbird mail folders you can recover by using a text editor as they are plain text files.
To avoid severe legal sanctions, you need an easy way to search for relevant Email in order to quickly meet legal discovery requests. In fact, an effective Email discovery solution can help mitigate these legal risks.
Both Kensium & Fortunewords are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Kensium has sinced written about articles on various topics from Home Improvement, Credit Cards and Arts. Author is an international computer forensics consultant. He is president of Data Triage Technologies, LLC.(), a. Kensium's top article generates over 5400 views. to your Favourites.
Fortunewords has sinced written about articles on various topics from Home Management, Data Recovery and Skin Cream. Data Triage Technologies is one of the leading experts in the field of email discovery, which restores electronically stored information in Email and associated attachments.. Fortunewords's top article generates over 74000 views. to your Favourites.