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Digital Forensics
Background
The defendant in this case was accused of regularly delivering batches of ready-mix concrete to public construction projects that did not meet applicable standards. The plaintiff claimed truck drivers were misreporting truck travel times to job sites, the amount of water added to the concrete, and truck pour times while on site – all of which could lead to concrete that did not meet industry standards. Additionally, the plaintiff provided expert testimony showing seemingly impossible travel times and concrete pour data.
Challenge
Data was provided to Digital Strata through two Microsoft SQL server database backups containing cement truck Trimble GPS telemetry data and 500,000 paper documents that represented delivery tickets scanned as PDFs. Our team found the search functionality of the original software that was available for the review, was too rigid to work with the large volume of data provided and had no mechanism to match the SQL data to the delivery tickets. In addition, each delivery record would need to be manually searched in MSSQL and the corresponding record exported to a PDF. We knew there was a better way. This presented a time and logistical challenge.
Solution
Digital Strata worked with the defendant to understand the underlying data contained within the telemetry databases, which allowed for highly targeted SQL queries that could pull data in a structured, bulk format. Digital Strata built a custom frontend using FileMaker that allowed the defendant to review the telemetry data and easily reconcile it with the provided delivery ticket PDF archive. Digital Strata then performed an extensive analysis of the provided data that ultimately exposed assumptions made by the plaintiffs that led to inaccurate and even outright impossible claims.
Result
Digital Strata submitted signed affidavits detailing our conclusions and worked with the defendants to craft counterarguments against the plaintiffs. The defendant was ultimately granted summary judgment, and all claims against them were dismissed.
Background
The case revolved around the illegal recording of privileged phone calls between prison inmates and their attorneys.
Plaintiff claimed that attorneys had requested their phone numbers be marked "privileged" in the prison database. This should have prevented these calls from being recorded.
Defendants claimed that the phone tracking database had "issues" that periodically reset the privileged flag. This resulted in all calls being recorded, regardless of privilege flags.
Problem
Call logs were provided by defendants as Excel files.
- 2 defendants provided call records as Excel files.
- Each set of Excel files contained, 5 years worth of data, split into monthly reports.
- Each Excel report was an unwieldly ~15MB in size apiece.
- 2 separate data schemas, one for each defendant.
Digital Strata’s client was able to understand the data that was provided, but the volume of data made it unwieldy to work with. Because it was split across so many large files, cross-referencing and synthesizing data from these spreadsheets was untenable.
Solution
Digital Strata took a two-pronged approach to solving this problem.
First, all data provided via Excel was normalized, and loaded into a SQL database. This allowed us to quickly and easily run queries against the entire dataset. Digital Strata worked with our client to craft numerous queries, enabling the client to easily find relevant data.
Second, Digital Strata wrote a number of computer scripts that cross-referenced data in the database with data provided by third parties (namely,
Result
Digital Strata were deposed as factual witnesses in the civil case (Johnson v. Corrections Corporation of America [Case 4:16-cv-00947-SRB]).
Based on our work in the civil case, Digital Strata was also asked to testify as factual witnesses in the related federal case (United States of America v. Lorenzo Black et al. [Case 2:16-cr-20032-JAR]).
The work performed by Digital Strata was instrumental in supporting the attorneys in reviewing the massive amount of data in an efficient, thorough and reliable fashion.
A settlement was reached that awarded 750 class members a total of $3.7 million.
Background
A tractor-trailer making a highway crossing was struck in its towed unit by a passenger vehicle, resulting in the death of the passenger vehicle’s driver. An investigation ensued in conjunction with a wrongful death suit against the trucking company by the deceased driver’s family.to determine who was at fault, and specifically for the defending law firm representing the trucking company, how much fault lay with the passenger vehicle’s driver. The digital evidence, in this case, was from the mobile phone of the deceased driver.
The Problem
It was believed the driver of the passenger vehicle was potentially distracted in the moments leading up to the accident as no evidence was found that the driver attempted to stop prior to the accident. Digital Strata was retained by defense counsel to determine if the plaintiff was, in fact, using her mobile phone prior to the accident.
The Solution
Digital Strata partnered with the law firm representing the trucking company to image and analyze the vehicle driver’s Apple iPhone for activity that might provide evidence of distracted driving.
Analysis of her device isolated text messaging activity to establish that the plaintiff was actively engaged in a texting session just prior to the accident. The texting logs were accessed in a defensible manner, and the metadata was preserved so that the messages could be authenticated to the Court.
Based on Digital Strata’s work, the defending law firm was able to greatly reduce the amount of damages paid to the plaintiff, since the provided evidence of texting prior to the accident was determined to be a contributing factor.
eDiscovery
Background
As a rule, eDiscovery should always follow a very specific, pre-planned workflow. This usually involves data collection and processing, while staying within parameters specified by the client, its law firm, and the eDiscovery team. Occasionally, file types fall out of this workflow, which can cause the entire system to come to a screeching halt.
A law firm bidding on work for a large pharmaceutical company was presented with a challenge that caused their normal process to derail. As part of this project, the law firm was provided with very large text files that appeared to be raw data dumps from structured data sources. They were expected to analyze and provide responsive data from these files,
The Problem
The law firm’s in-house eDiscovery operation did not know what the data was or where the files came from, and their standard process of collection and processing produced errors such as unknown file types and files that were so large text could not be extracted from them.
Because this was a pending bid for work, the law firm did not want to ask their prospective client questions about the data for fear of not seeming up to the job. Instead, their internal eDiscovery team assembled a list of questions and issues with the data but were unable to find the answers on their own.
While this law firm had a significant in-house eDiscovery operation, certain aspects of this project were evidently outside of their abilities, scope of work, and experience, so they engaged Digital Strata to remedy the situation.
The Solution
Within one day, Digital Strata, armed with a minimal debrief from the law firm’s eDiscovery team, opened the files and performed the needed analysis. We found the data exports were from a proprietary database of adverse drug effects. Using targeted search terms and other advanced search parameters, revealed the data included specific tables pertaining to drugs and their effects. Digital Strata was able to quickly recognize complicating factors within the data files, and throughout the eDiscovery process to achieve the client’s desired results.
Within just a few days, Digital Strata provided comprehensive answers to the law firm’s previously unanswerable questions, and follow-up advisory services to the law firm throughout the duration of their bidding process.
This situation illustrates how unknown, seemingly unstructured data types can often result in errors, and even work stoppage, during standard eDiscovery processing. Data must be treated and analyzed with a distinctly different process and workflow. This out-of-the-box thinking and analysis, combined with accurate database administration and programming expertise, empowered Digital Strata to provide a completely transparent analysis of the data while precluding client contact, delivering the desired outcome that the law firm needed.
Background
Our client had a strategic mandate to acquire smaller companies within its industry. To protect itself against future litigation from these mergers and acquisitions, the company used routine eDiscovery: collect, preserve, and archive data. Digital Strata worked with the client on many of these projects and had a workflow to efficiently perform these tasks. However, sometimes this occurred on a larger scale and presented challenges.
Challenge
In one instance, the prospective acquisitions had indicators of a possible US Department of Justice Second Request. The matter required the collection of 35 custodial data sources, as well as numerous non-custodial data sources (network shares, SharePoint sites, etc), some with up to three incremental collections. Data were to be produced and submitted to the DOJ within a short timeline, and missing deadlines could delay or prevent the acquisition.
Digital Strata was contracted to collect the raw data and hand it off to a national eDiscovery vendor for processing, review hosting, and production. The raw volume of data collected was more than 23TB, which was not only cost-prohibitive but would add significant time to getting documents available for review.
Solution
Digital Strata provided the primary team tasked with internal collections and processing. We made the case to our client to allow us to use their on-premise Nuix deployment to perform bulk culling on the raw data before sending it to the hosting vendor. This reduced the data to a more manageable, and therefore affordable volume. To further reduce the data, Digital Strata worked with our client’s subject matter experts and outside counsel’s antitrust attorneys to eliminate non-custodial data sources that were deemed non-relevant.
Result
Through Digital Strata’s plan of using our client’s in-house capabilities, we reduced the volume of data sent to the outside vendor by 90%, from 23TB to just 2.5TB. Our strategy saved our client $7,000,000 in processing and hosting fees and they were able to meet the DOJ deadlines.
Data Infiltration/ Exfiltration
Background
A medium-sized technology company hired a new product manager to help create a new product line. This person was hired by a company that is a technology partner of his new employer. Unfortunately, the new employer did not have a new employee policy in place to inoculate itself from the infiltration of sensitive or confidential information.
Challenge
Shortly after the recently hired product manager started in his new role, he began using templates from his prior employer. He dutifully swapped out the watermarks, headers, and footers with the new company’s information. However, Metadata associated with the files indicated these templates came from the prior employer. Further, the templates, along with some product and marketing plans, were distributed to teammates. As expected, those teammates forwarded some of these items to individuals in other departments. In less than 60 days, files made their way onto network shares and SharePoint sites, email attachments, iPhones and iPads, and several external storage devices.
The Solution
Once the situation was identified, the company's legal department worked with its outside counsel and Digital Strata to locate all the infiltrated data and securely remove the items. This ultimately involved 45 custodians, 15 non-custodial locations, and 87 devices and cloud locations. The cost for the remediation exceeded $100,000, including the disruption to the custodians to remediate their devices, time expended by the IT team to coordinate access to the sources and devices, and the fees for outside counsel and resources from the internal legal team.
The Result
With a properly designed and implemented program by Digital Strata we minimize the threat of employee-initiated introduction of proprietary information, the cost to remediate the original employee's digital universe would have been less than $4,000.