e-Discovery

Even though most e-Discovery projects involve image output (TIFF, JPG, PDF etc.), we find that the specifications of the output images are rarely discussed thoroughly. An important detail, which is usually omitted from e-Discovery processing specifications, is whether or not output images should be normalized.

Image normalization (in the e-Discovery sense) is the process of transforming images to make them consistent in terms of dimensions, resolution, color depth and orientation. For example, larger images can be resized to 8.5″x11″, landscape pages can be rotated to portrait, images with different resolutions can be converted to 300 DPI etc.

Most mailboxes contain both active and deleted e-mail messages. By “deleted e-mail messages”, I am referring to messages that were permanently deleted. For example, a message that was deleted using SHIFT+Delete in Outlook or a message that was deleted from the “Deleted Items” folder. In some e-mail platforms, deleted messages are not immediately purged and can easily be recovered. For example, Ms Outlook does not purge deleted e-mail messages from a Personal Storage Table (PST) file until the PST is compacted.

If you are involved in the production or review of electronic evidence, you might have seen e-mail addresses that look a bit different than usual. For example:

Have you ever wondered what these values are? The two scenarios we run into most frequently are as follows.

De-duplication is used extensively in digital forensics and e-Discovery as a way of culling documents. While the process itself is simple, de-duplication can be performed in numerous ways which affect review time, cost and your understanding of the custodians. Here are some questions that frequently come up while we discuss de-duplication options with clients.