In my prior company (life) we developed intellectual property for operating systems primitives in windows, and network security protocols such as IPSec (Internet Protocol Security), e.g. VPN.   We had “bake-off’s” sponsored by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) that blesses all of the standards that make up the Internet, to prove the worthiness of the security protocols in a way that was open to the most sophisticated cryptologists and hackers in the world.

Similarly, the legal argument for open source eForensics is a good one in that provides transparency to these experts to examine and soundness of the algorithms, operating system primitives, network protocols, and crypto libraries used to produce digital evidence.

This type of scrutiny will never be obtained in a closed and proprietary system.

This paper from Brian Carrier from Purdue University, lays out the legal argument for the use of open source tools in the field of eDiscovery and eForensics by applying “Daubert” guidelines.

Open Source Legal Argument for eForensics and eDiscovery

In Mr. Carrier’s paper, he discuss the major concepts in eForensics as they apply to eDiscovery :

Acquistion, Analysis, and Presentation.

The analysis phase includes:

- Inculpatory Evidence: That which supports a given theory ( e.g., emperical log files that show Volume Serial ID’s of each hard drive, complete discovery of the the file system, disposition of each file extracted/copied)

- Exculpatory Evidence: That which contradicts a given theory (e.g., shows that data acquistion was not properly performed)

- Evidence of tampering: That which can not be related to any theory, but shows
that the system was tampered with to avoid identification (e.g., spoliation)

In terms of admissibility of evidence, The Daubert process identifies four general categories that are used as guidelines when assessing a procedure:

- Testing: Can and has the procedure been tested?
- Error Rate: Is there a known error rate of the procedure?
- Publication: Has the procedure been published and subject to peer review?
- Acceptance: Is the procedure generally accepted in the relevant scientific
community?

Just as there is a “Chain of Custody”, that produces log files at the point of origin to log all of the data to be captured and it’s disposition, subsequent verification and encryption — there is also a similar set of analysis to show the operating system primitives that are called to produce this chain of custody.

These points of reference lay the groundwork for defensible eForensic tools not only for data acquisition, but also for eDiscovery processing, searching, culling, and file transformations for productions to opposing counsel.

We welcome your input on this discussion.

Jeffrey Goodwin
Founder, eDiscoverySquad, LLC

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This is a video interview of a law firm with 20+ lawyers, who have moved to Google Apps.   During the interview, the key partners estimate that they have saved $450K in IT costs over 5 years by moving their law firm to Google Apps.

The approach used was consultative to find out the goals of the firm, and then figure out how to implement them in Google Apps resulting in increased collaboration, ease of use, and offsite anywhere/anytime access to critical information.

To see a video overview about Google Apps click here.

http://ediscoverysquad.com/google-apps

With recent developments in the last month, Google Apps is shaping up to be a powerful platform now and in the future for Law Firms.

Google Vault is available now as an App for Google to do compliance archiving and eDiscovery.   It allows “matters” to be defined, and tags your email and attachments with the “Matter ID”.   When I am involved in eDiscovery engagements, I often see my clients using these “Matter ID’s” in the subject line of their email, and this concept extends very easily to Google Vault.

Kent Walker, Google Senior Vice President and General Counsel gives his perspective on Google Vault:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZd_hIln1-I

Another powerful feature for law firms is to setup a Google Voice number (includes free nationwide calling), and see all of your telephone calls including time and duration in a consolidated log.  Voice mails automatically are copied to email, and are transcribed by a speech to text engine that is included by Google.

http://www.obihai.com/obiplus.html

The OBI 110 Device (< $50) can work with your existing cordless phones at home, and the OBI 202 (< $75) handles up to 12 extensions and works with cost effective ( < $100 ) IP Phones from Cisco.

I use this type of a system everyday and have been very pleased with it.   When filling out my time cards, I can go back an look at exactly how long a teleconference took, and easily search for text in my Voice mails.

One limitation with Google Voice is that it doesn’t handle Fax, so you will need to setup an online Fax service and route the faxes to your Gmail.   However, this is less and less of a problem as most folks scan these days anyway.

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Model Behavior: Federal and State Court Rules on E-Discovery e-discoverymatters.com ·Jeffrey Goodwin I am planning to provide comments to the local proposal here in Western Washington, which was brought to my attention by Emily Kelly from Morton & McGoldrick.

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