Tiger Woods, Holidays, LinkedIn.com, & Digital Forensics

by Rob Fitzgerald

Happy Holidays.  I hope everyone had a safe and fun Thanksgiving.  My personal approach to the holiday season is to treat everything like I am on the old TV show “Candid Camera” and just laugh.

With Christmas Season starting approximately 2 months ago, I shouldn’t have to remind you (but I will) to use CAUTION with emails, pictures, postings, and of course, voicemail messages.  Believe it or not, when the time is right, these will all be used against you.

Voicemail messages?  Yes, for anyone that hasn’t heard the clip, it appears Tiger Woods called a mistress and asked her to remove her name from her cellphone so that his wife couldn’t identify the caller.  Make sure your clients and employees know that The Lorenzi Group (www.thelorenzigroup.com) can recover live and deleted voicemails.

I had lunch with Manny again, he always wants sushi!  Is anyone using his software tools?  Let’s hear from you.  If you aren’t, please let me know why.

Along with Santa, Hanukah Harry, Kwanzaa Kevin, and Ramadan Richie, CMR217 is coming to town, at least in Massachusetts anyway.   Supposedly, May is the deadline, of course, they have changed the deadline a few times, so who knows.  Does anyone really know?  Regardless, what have you been doing to get ready?  If you’re legal counsel or a CPA professional, have you discussed this with your clients?  Is YOUR office safe? 

Attorney Cam Shilling from McLane (www.mclane.com) and I had a great time working with Karina Drumheller from UNH Professional Development and Training (www.unh.edu) on their Annual Conference – Leading in Times of Change.  We presented on the changing Digital World from an employers’ perspective and how to protect yourself, your company, and your employees.  We had a shill in the audience (Marc) and the biggest comment he made afterwards was that companies still have a long way to go.  Marc felt that the questions were great but showed an overall lack of corporate preparedness.

Is there a Lit Support/Legal Vendor/Attorney job board for local openings only?  If so, please post.  I’m not talking about Monster.com or something that focuses on the world.  I am looking for an easy to access and use website that we can all post to, similar to Craigslist but more organized and only for people being laid off or starting new firms.  If not, there should be.  If so, (again) please post it and I will let people know about it.

ALSP has their monthly lunch and learn on Thursday.  Are YOU going?  If not, why?  These are great opportunities to meet with peers, learn something new, and get out of the office.  If you are not networking now, when you need your network, it won’t be there (HINT HINT lawyers and lit support professionals).

Kevin & Jeff over at Boston Litigation Services (www.BostonLit.com) have launched Chicago Litigation Services (www.ChicagoLit.com).  Things seem to be going very well for them.

Jim Berriman and his team at Evidox (www.Evidox.com) are cranking along as well.  The last call I got from them was to assist them on a project in NYC.  I love NYC.  (NOTE: The Lorenzi Group did the collection on the SAME day)

Jim Gardner has moved over to Key Discovery (www.key-discovery.com).  I spoke with him about 3 weeks ago and am just remembering I owe him lunch.  We were discussing their approach to the Boston market and what the next year is going to bring.  It sounds like they have a focused plan.  I hope he can execute on it.

I spoke to my friend Ari Kaplan (www.arikaplanadvisors.com) the other day.  He has been busy traveling the country helping firms educate their attorneys on the process of networking and business development.  If you haven’t met him or attended a seminar, look him up.  He takes the scary concept of professional networking and breaks it into little steps that are actually achievable.  Remember, if you build your network now, when you need it, it will be there (see ALSP above).  SIDE QUESTION: Are YOU on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)?  If not, why?  If yes, are you and I linked?  Along those lines, when is the last time you checked your profile on Avvo.com (www.avvo.com)?  You might want to.

By the way, what does LinkedIn.com let you do?  Why is it a big deal?  LinkedIn.com allows you to connect with other people quickly, often with a warm (personal) connection.  Obviously, LinkedIn.com allows you to see where friends and past colleagues are working.  However, the search tools can help you find new employees, witnesses/ex-employees of clients (or opposing parties), expert witnesses, new contacts locally, contacts in other areas of the country/world, and more.  If used correctly, LinkedIn.com can be a powerful tool that can connect you to people you want to meet (example: Rob knows Brian over at Genzyme (www.genzyme.com), it would help my case or help my client if I could talk to him, let me call/email Rob), and allow people to meet you.  HOWEVER, there is a caution.  The caution is that LinkIn.com can also allow employees to walk off with client contacts and more.  Be sure to have an appropriate acceptable use policy in your office.

Let’s talk digital forensics for a minute (one of my favorite subjects).  Everyone knows we have upgraded to FTK3.  All for all, I am loving it.  I think it is still scaring Jason a bit; lots of colorful buttons (sorry, J).  If you are looking at FTK3, start planning now to upgrade to 64 bit machines.  We have been working with Tony and Jason in Tech Support at AccessData (www.accessdata.com) and are learning that speed can be improved on that platform.  The Tech Support team there must HATE me because I call with some of the most inane questions, but I want to know if FTK3 really is as good as AD says it is.  So far, no complaints. 

Actually, that is not true.  Here are my 2 complaints so far: 1) FTK3 needs to increase the size of the reports it can generate.  This is EXTREMELY frustrating as it takes a long time to generate large reports and if the report generator crashes, you have to start over; 2) Ongoing logging of information has to be better.  When the reports we were generating crashed, there were no logs created – what’s up with that?; 3) Users should be able to restart report generation.  Maybe reports could be broken up into fixed sizes prior to generation and delivered in chunks, similar to their automated data carving and indexing.  (Yes, I did write 3 complaints, glad to see you noticed.)  Did you know it handles Macs, too? 

Speaking of Macs, Derek over at Blackbag (www.blackbagtech.com) had us beta some new tools that are part of their suite, and they were, well, sweet.  Derek, thank you for letting us Beta Test and for the great support you have been giving us.

ASR (www.asrdata.com) released a new version of SMART.  Andy and I have been friends for a long time (in a digital forensics sense).  One of the things I like is that his software runs on anything that has a CD reader.  Plug in the dongle, load the CD and you are ready to go.  I expect to be testing this over the next few weeks, but with the holidays here, it might not be until the end of the month. 

PRESERVATION QUESTION: What do you do to protect yourself when an attorney is hesitant to request electronic evidence to be forensically preserved?  (Yes, amazingly, this is still happening)

Is there anyone willing to discuss digital forensic pricing?  I have been seeing some WILD claims about how expensive computer forensics is, and this concerns me.  Recently I have had conversations with competitors about their pricing models and have heard everything from flat daily rates to per GB rates to hourly rates.  I am not so upset with HOW it is priced but WHAT it is priced.  Some of the models seem absurd to me.

Nationally, we have seen PI Associations push for legislation that computer investigators (I like to say analysts) be regulated by the state under the State PI Associations.  I agree that we should have some type of regulation; however, I don’t think PI’s really want a bunch of tech-savvy geeks encroaching on their space.  I know I don’t want The Lorenzi Group employees to be tailing a cheating golfer, I mean spouse (sorry Tiger), 8 hours a day.  What are YOU doing to protect your business and make sure State PI Associations don’t push their agenda?

I’ll probably post one more blog by the end of the year.  If anyone has comments or ideas feel free to post or email me.  Enjoy the season, stay busy, stay profitable, and stay safe.  – Rob