Vicarious Trauma: The Hidden Cost of Digital Forensic Investigations
By Tim Rollins
This article first appeared in eForensics Magazine, vol. 10, issue no. 5, in May 2022. Exterro is reprinting it here to further spread the message about the importance of protecting the mental health of digital forensic investigators. Justin Tolman, Exterro FTK Product Evangelist, is the author of the article and served as a computer forensic investigator for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Around 2015, I was working as a digital forensic investigator for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. I was analyzing computers seized as evidence in criminal investigations, helping bring... Read More
While parties to a legal matter have an obligation to produce relevant ESI during discovery, there are limits to what production they can compel from third parties, including employees. In the matter In Re Pork Antitrust Legislation, the court found that a party, in this case a company, was not in “control” over its employees’ personal devices, even when used in connection with work-related activities, so did not have a duty to produce texts from those devices. Overview In this antitrust case, key players in the American pork industry are accused of price fixing... 
There are so many causes out there that deserve funding, it’s hard to pick which ones are most worthy. Chances are you have a few causes that you give to. (For me, it’s a local education non-profit, my public radio station, and the animal shelter on a regular basis, with the occasional small one-off here or there.) But you probably recognize that there are more causes that deserve funding. Three that we’re pretty sure are deserving are the American Red Cross, Stand Up to Cancer, and the Make a Wish Foundation. I... 
Commonly referred to as a "digital fingerprint," a hash value is a special encryption code that is associated with each computer file. Hash values provide digital files with a unique identifier that corresponds to its contents. If the contents change, the file's hashtag will change as well, indicating that the file is not the same as it was before. In e-discovery, one can compare hash values before and after collection to verify that a file is the same before and after collection. To understand how MD5 hashing relates to e-discovery one must... 
The Illinois Biometric Information Protection Act (BIPA) has been in effect since 2008, but enforcement was relatively rare until 2015. Since then, a variety of enforcement actions have taken place, with the most recent being this $4 million settlement of a class action lawsuit filed against Lemonade, a New York City-based insurance company that offered insurance to Illinois residents. Overview In May 2022, Lemonade Insurance Company reached a $4 million settlement to end a lawsuit that claimed the company collected, stored, analyzed and used the biometric data of thousands of its... 
If you hop over to our news page, you can see the latest exciting news about our funding. Or if you prefer you could read about it on the Wall Street Journal or maybe the official press release. It's up to you. But for those of you visiting on the blog, I have an opportunity to provide a little more context in a little less formal manner. Let's get to it. The press release explains: Exterro, Inc., a portfolio company of Leeds Equity Partners (“Leeds Equity”), announced today that it has completed... 
Information governance is the set of rules used to control the creation, management, storage, and ultimately the disposition of data within an organization. It governs data from paper files, phone records, and voicemails to electronic data like emails, spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, database records, and new types of electronically stored information (ESI). As a definition, it works well, but in practice, it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to get from identifying the need for IG to having an effective, functioning set of policies and procedures. Fortunately, in Exterro’s Basics of E-Discovery...