The Advanced eDiscovery Institute at Georgetown is set up again to deliver invaluable content, and Avansic’s CEO, Dr. Gavin Manes, is looking forward to being part of it this year. It’s been a while since we’ve been to an in-person conference, so he’s sharing the top three things he’s looking forward to this week!
First is the panel The Art of Defensible Data Disposition, and I’m really looking forward to learning about applying eDiscovery techniques to deletion – and the ‘defensible’ part of that is the key. For years, Records and Information Management (RIM) programs and a handful of other methods have existed to convince people to get rid of parts of their data. However, many people, myself included, don’t often clean up redundant, obsolete, and trivial data. At Avansic, we have workflows using eDiscovery tools and techniques that allow us to search entire enterprises for data, categorize it automatically, and cue up data for destruction. Determining obsolete data is the most difficult of the categories because you’re trying to figure out when it was last used. That sounds easy, but there could be no record in a document itself indicating that timing. That information does, however, exist in the forensic nuggets in the networks. I hope to learn that the methods we have been using for years are still viable and defensible, and I’m really interested in the updated terminology and methodology used by the presenters for data destruction.
The Great Resignation presentation will be very interesting because at Avansic, our most common forensics case is related to employee separation and the theft of trade secrets during the suspected event. In our 20+ year history performing those investigations, 50% of the time there was data actually taken and in the other half there was no indication of data exfiltration. Now that a significant portion of the workforce is remote and using cloud-based applications, the possibility exists for a shift from forensic investigation of computer systems to an analysis of logs and other user activity. I’m curious to hear from these panelists about custody and control of the data owned by the company but in possession of a third party.
The last is the panel I’m speaking on – Identifying and Challenging Fabricated Evidence. This is a really hot topic with all the discussion in popular news about deepfakes and is also becoming a pervasive problem in eDiscovery. I’m very lucky to be speaking with David Gaston of the NLRB, Denise Backhouse of Littler Mendelson, and Rebekah Bailey of Nichols Kaster. We’re going to talk about how to spot suspicious evidence, how to leverage metadata to authenticate ESI, and the techniques for demonstrating evidence alteration.
It's going to be a great conference, and we’ll have more to say with a wrap up after it’s over. Stay tuned and see you there!
