Protecting The Corporate Jewels: Digital Forensics In Internal Investigations

Digital forensics, in particular as applied to internal investigations of potential trade secret theft or improper use of proprietary data, is an area of labyrinthine complexity, but some principles are clear enough. In this article, James Vaughn, managing director at iDiscovery Solutions, covers the basics. Among his suggestions: Make sure you know what evidence is perishable and how to preserve what’s needed, and understand the nuances of email and file servers and all the ways that data can leave a company. Also, make clear to employees that in exchange for the convenience of using their personal devices for work they will need to give up some privacy, and reserve the ability to “wipe” devices that have been lost or stolen. But that too requires some care and judgment. “I’ve seen situations all too often,” he writes, “in which a client by default remotely wiped an employee’s mobile device upon departure, and then wanted evidence, which no longer existed, from that device.”