Investigative Computer Forensics: The Practical Guide for Lawyers, Accountants, Investigators, and Business Executives

Foreword

Over the course of a 25-year career in corporate investigations that have required my expertise in places as diverse as San Diego to Shanghai and New York to New Delhi, I have witnessed a dramatic shift in the methodologies, technologies, and type of personnel deployed on fact-finding exercises. From traditional gumshoe-style investigations of larceny, fraud, and crime to sophisticated corporate electronic discovery boondoggles that require the analysis of mind-boggling volumes of electronic data, the world of investigations now requires a level of technical sophistication that was unimaginable a generation ago. The acronyms are daunting, the risks of taking missteps are found at every turn, and the ramifications of mismanaging data have been felt by plaintiffs, defendants, and corporations far and wide in recent years in the form of adverse inferences, sanctions, and default judgments.

One of my early major cases was the subject of a New York Times best-seller and film starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall titled A Civil Action, in which William H. Macy played my role, and he hit it out of the park. But what is interesting to me today these short 17 years later is that during that entire epic investigation and courtroom battle in which we were pitched against two of the nation's most fearsome litigation firms, the words electronic discovery were never uttered. Our world was of paper documents and the physical handling of evidence acquired the old-fashioned way.