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	A Succinct Primer Each month receive a one to two-page document devoted to practical information about taking advantage of the power that electronic discovery brings to civil litigation. Those best prepared usually prevail.
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Four Phases

ScopingAcquisitionAnalysisReporting

Forensics Consulting Solutions (FCS) approaches electronic evidence discovery as a four phase process designed to maximize the talents of FCS’ experienced project managers and forensic examiners.

This process is designed to accomplish electronic evidence discovery in a forensically sound manner. The process is designed to complete projects on time, within budget, and to maximize value for our client. The end result is the production of relevant data that our clients can use to gain a competitive advantage over their opponents during the litigation process.

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Scoping

The first phase is planning the project so that we fully understand the needs of our clients and how we can best fulfill them.

FCS believes strongly in detailed planning prior to the start of any project. Proper planning ensures that our clients fully understand what to expect from the process. Our experience has shown that without proper planning there will be many unknowns that will cause cost overruns and missed deadlines.

This phase includes developing a complete understanding of the evidence involved in the case and what information the client wishes to obtain from that pool of evidence. This requires careful planning in a variety of areas including the physical location of the evidence to be examined, the types of media the evidence is stored on, what search terms should be applied to extract relevant data, and how that data will eventually be reported to the client.

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Acquisition

The second phase is the gathering of the case evidence in a manner that overcomes the constraints, risks, and logistical challenges unique to each case.

The emphasis is placed on acquiring the evidence in a forensically sound manner where the chain of evidence is preserved in accordance to best practices of evidence handling. Proper evidence handling is critical to the success of the project. The evidence acquisition can be done by FCS personnel or FCS can train the client’s in-house information technology staff to accomplish the acquisition.

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Analysis

The third phase of the process is the actual analysis of the collected data.

This phase revolves around the expert use of the tools, methods, and search terms that were decided upon in the first phase of the discovery process. FCS first strips away non-responsive data such as known operating system files and then focuses on what is left. Searching and sorting can include placing relevant data into responsive, privileged, and confidential categories to prevent privileged and proprietary data from being inadvertently produced to the opposition.

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Reporting

The fourth and final phase is the reporting of the findings of the analysis phase.

Reporting can take place using a variety of methods. Evidence can be provided in its native format if that meets the needs of the client. FCS can also produce evidence in common graphical formats that when properly prepared can be entered into popular litigation support tools such as Summation Legal Technologies’ Summation™ and Dataflight Software’s Concordance™ software suites. This method provides attorneys the ability to search and utilize a large amount of relevant data in a quick and efficient manner.