Almost every scenario and every claim presented to an attorney for examination lends itself to being tested and analyzed with a timeline --- and  to being proved or disproved with a timeline.

What if you could nail down critical times, places and  events in your case and put them all on a timeline? Electronic Discovery offers that opportunity -- not every time, but a lot more often than many lawyers recognize. By using  Electronic Discovery, you can extract all current, archived, and deleted data for discovery purposes.

It has been more than 30 years since the United States Supreme Court first addressed the issue of Electronic Discovery and decided that rules for Electronic Discovery were no different than the rules for conventional discovery. During that period electronic commerce and human interaction has gone from a vague idea grasped and utilized by only a few, to a way of life, widely understood and used by adults and children alike.

In the early days, the concept of collecting e-mail messages --  with their associated file attachments, and other data stored on a computer or computer network, seemed like a daunting task reserved only for cases and attorneys with the largest litigation budgets.

	Today, modern computer forensic tools and technique has rendered Electronic Discovery affordable by most clients.
	Data can now be readily recovered from files residing on laptops, office PCs, home computers, network servers, floppy discs, PDAs, CD-ROMs, tape backups, other archive media and third-party storage and archival systems.

When ignoring the potential offered by Electronic Discovery, many attorneys fail to focus on the following:

It is estimated that only 70% of the material produced on a computer is ever converted to a hard copy. If that is true, the attorney who seeks only hard copies is voluntarily abandoning  almost a third of his potential evidence without the opposition making a single objection or the court making a single ruling. Is there a lawyer anyplace who would tell a prospective client, "Although Electronic Discovery might reveal 30% more relevant information, I prefer to do it the old fashioned way."?

Because computer data can remain on a hard drive -- even after the file has been deleted, or the drive reformatted, Electronic Discovery carries with it the potential of discovering intelligence and evidence that the opposition has claimed does not exist and never did exist. Using Electronic Discovery to recover and reconstitute deleted or encrypted files is analogous to: Getting trash out of the opposition dumpster over a period of months or years. Turning back the clock. Reassembling paper documents that the opposition shredded.  Is there a lawyer anyplace who would tell a prospective client, "Although Electronic Discovery might reveal relevant material like deleted eMail, that the opposition doesn't want us to see, I don't use Electronic Discovery because gentlemen don't read other peoples mail."?

How does it actually work?

You subpoena a hard drive or laptop computer or desktop computer and we image the hard drive and give you a CD or DVD that contains  eMails, spreadsheets, graphics and documents. In most instances that will include deleted items that the opposition does not want you to see. We will in most instances recover usable evidence off the hard drive even if they have formatted it! We have a response for those who complain about the inconvenience, disruption and potential damage caused by having to release their computer  for such an examination. The response is simple. There is no need for them to release their computer to us. Using non-invasive computer forensic techniques we can go to their office and collect a true image of their Hard Drive in less than an hour -- while they watch! In most cases we don't even have to open the computer case!