Forensic Reports And Discovery Litigation

On Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane Katrina destroyed thousands of homes on the Gulf Coast. When homeowners were finally allowed to return to their homes and saw the damage, they began the process of working with their insurers to file their claim and start over. What they were faced with were claim denials for their homeowner policies.

Zach Scruggs, one of many attorneys involved in litigation against these insurers, said Forensic turned over the e-mails as part of the pretrial discovery litigation. Homeowners who where suing State Farm Insurance for Hurricane Katrina claim coverage had accused the insurer of pressuring their engineers to modify reports regarding the hurricane damaged property so that policyholders' claims could be denied.

Recently obtained internal e-mails from an engineering firm that helped State Farm adjust claims are helping lawyers litigate their claims because of the evidence they have obtained with E-Discovery and Computer Forensics. Some of these e-mails are conversations between the Forensic president and CEO Robert Kochan and Randy Down, the firm's vice president of engineering services. In one particular e-mail, it says the firm will continue working with State Farm, but discusses needing to "redo the wording" of a report after a complaint by Alexis King, a State Farm Manager in Mississippi, so "such that the conclusions are better supported."

Alexis King didn't want local engineers to inspect properties because they were "too emotionally involved" and were "working very hard to find justifications to call it wind damage when the facts only show water induced damage," according to an e-mail. Randy Down questioned the State Farm's motivations and questioned the ethics of the insurer via e-mail with the insurer telling the firm what to put in the reports.

All of this information would have gone unnoticed if it wasn't for the field of Computer Forensics. Computer forensics has quickly become a vital tool and source of information for criminal investigators, corporate counsel, and prosecutors. Computer forensics investigators use their skills to identify and restore formatted, corrupted, deleted or hidden files from computers or other electronic media while maintaining crucial data trails, time & date stamps and accurate chain of custody & controls. They also obtain access to protected or encrypted data by using specialized software.

Forensic Services - Enforcement And Applications

Computer forensics is the process of preserving, identifying, extracting and documenting valuable electronic data. The term was first used in 1991 in a training session of the International Association of Computer Specialists (IACIS). Computer forensics has been used in law enforcement and military applications for a long time now, to gather evidence from electronic sources. Today, it is being increasingly used even in the corporate sector. The increasing volumes of electronic data being created, stored and transferred each day is the main reason for this.

Every second, thousands of pages of electronic data are being transferred across the world. In the process, the data could be lost or altered. Computer forensics involves the retrieval of this lost data using special software tools and techniques. It is used to identify valuable data from personal computers or other electronic data storage devices. It is also used to identify the leakage of sensitive data from the computer, or any inherent weaknesses in the system.

When documents are created electronically, they are stored in temporary files. Even when they are deleted or updated, some remnants still remain on the hard disk and can be recovered using special tools.

Computer forensics involves the creation of a backup of all the data in the computer. This data is a mirror image of the entire hard disk, and contains even temporary, deleted or altered files. The forensic expert creates a digital fingerprint of the original hard drive to ensure that it is not tampered with while retrieving data. Data is retrieved from the mirror file rather than the original file, so as to not alter date stamps or other useful data. The retrieval process also reveals historical information about the file, such as when it was deleted or altered. The retrieved information can be converted into any required format. There are thus three stages in data recovery: acquire, analyze and report.

There are many companies that provide computer forensic services. There are also many software tools with several useful options such as cloning and disk imaging, file preview, picture gallery, etc. that enable faster and more accurate forensic recoveries.