Crime Scene Evidence in Civil Litigation: A Litigator’s Guide to Preservation, Forensic Collection, Common Pitfalls, and Expert Support

This session establishes why digital evidence has become central to modern litigation, introducing the digital ecosystem surrounding individuals and organizations. Speakers Jake Green and Nema Romani share their credentials and explain how metadata reveals critical information about files, messages, and pictures that can be more reliable than testimony.

Explore the scientific method underlying digital forensics, including identification, acquisition, analysis, reporting, and peer review. This session covers the five main categories of digital evidence and attorneys’ ethical duty to preserve electronic evidence, with consequences ranging from sanctions to case dismissal.

Learn why the first hour after an incident is critical and how early preservation prevents expensive problems later. This session covers establishing scope, proportionality, reasonableness standards, and the common mistakes that destroy critical evidence before experts are even contacted.

Understand how to establish and maintain chain of custody documentation that protects evidence integrity for court admissibility. This session details the different types of forensic acquisition—physical, file system, logical, and cloud—and how modern encryption has changed available extraction methods.

Discover how metadata answers critical questions about who created, accessed, and modified documents and when. This session examines Windows-specific artifacts like Jump Lists, MRU entries, and Link Files that establish user activity patterns and prove intellectual property theft cases.

Mobile devices contain pictures, call history, messages, and location data that frequently contradict testimony in insurance fraud and motor vehicle accident cases. Learn about BYOD challenges, preservation windows for critical databases, and how cloud evidence can save cases when devices are destroyed.

Understand Daubert standards and Rule 702 requirements for expert testimony admissibility in digital forensics cases. This session covers how to present complex forensic data effectively to juries and best practices for building productive attorney-expert relationships.

Matt Jackson and Scott Pearson examine the changing landscape of data sources including dynamic documents, collaboration platforms like Slack and Discord, and cloud storage. Learn about technical competence requirements for attorneys and the unique challenges of mobile device discovery.

Legal holds involve more than sending notification emails—proper back-end implementation requires understanding various platforms and their capabilities. This session reveals critical pitfalls like Slack’s edit-versus-delete settings and differences between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 hold implementations.

Analyze real-world cases including FTC v. Match Group, Meta Platforms litigation, and Williams v. American College of Education to understand how preservation failures lead to sanctions. These cautionary tales demonstrate how technological glitches, auto-delete functions, and intentional destruction result in consequences ranging from cost awards to terminating sanctions.

Examine how forensic experts detect fabricated evidence through metadata analysis, as demonstrated in Rossbach where approximately 100 points proved a text message image was not authentic. Learn how simple details like emoji designs and export formats can expose undisclosed devices and fraudulent evidence.

This concluding session provides a comprehensive seven-step preservation action checklist covering legal holds, source identification, evidence isolation, credential preservation, defensive collection, documentation, and expert engagement. Key takeaways emphasize that spoliation is usually a small decision made too late, not a dramatic act.