Craig Ball Leads Off CEIC Programs with Pre-Conference Workshop For Lawyers and Techies

Patrick Burke Craig Ball, one of the world’s leading attorney forensic experts, led off CEIC 2011’s educational panels were launched with a sweeping presentation entitled “Nerdy Things Lawyers Need To Know About Computer Forensics and a Few Nerdy Things Forensics People Need to Know About the Law.”

Employing his renowned ability to translate between lawyers and technologists, Ball covered a broad swath of e-discovery issues ranging from the many ways data hides on computer systems, why forensics is important and what it can uncover that can aids legal strategies, the importance of metadata and defensible, smart and cost-effective strategies for preservation and production of electronically stored information (ESI) in litigations.

Ball’s two-and-a-half hour computer forensics tour-de-force included scores of nuggets surprising to most in the room, including the following “did you knows?”:

-- that iPads capture screenshots and log keystrokes that can often be retrieved months or years later?

-- that even when one deletes images from their computer, the images are often preserved in “thumbs.db” that preserve the thumbnail versions of pictures.

-- that de-NISTing, which is meant to screen out known irrelevant computer program applications, do not reflect Windows 7 or Office 2010 applications (used by some 350 million users worldwide).

-- that the decision to TIFF ESI can cause the size of documents to increase to 18 times their original volume which can vastly inflate hosting and production costs.