one

A national law firm needed to restore and review via keyword searches three terabytes of client data dating back to 1990 for an environmental case².   Blank Law & Technology restored over 300 backup tapes and assisted its client law firm with a three month keyword search, document review, and production process. 

APPROXIMATE COST: $350,000.00

  two

A group of law firms working on multi-district litigation approached Blank Law & Technology regarding online hosting of millions of pages of documents.  More than forty different groups would have varying levels of access to a range of documents.  By Stipulation and Order, Blank Law & Technology hosted this database on its online document review platform and assisted various parties and their attorneys in the review process, while preserving cross-platform/cross-party confidentiality. 

APPROXIMATE COST:  $1.2 Million

  three

A law firm’s client wanted to return floppy diskettes to his former employer, but was concerned that the diskettes would be tampered with after their return.  Blank Law & Technology was retained to make evidence-quality copies of the diskettes and provide them to the client’s primary counsel. 

APPROXIMATE COST: $500.00

  four

An employee of a client resigned and threatened to file a lawsuit.  The contents of the employee’s desktop and laptop computers might be important in litigation, and the employer did not want them disturbed.  However, other employees needed access to the computers to continue their work.  Blank Law & Technology was retained to make evidence-quality images of the hard drives of the desktop and laptop to preserve for use in any litigation. 

APPROXIMATE COST (of this and many similar purely technical projects): $2,000.00

  five

A Washington D.C. law firm sued a company and former officers for theft of trade secrets and breach of fiduciary duty.  Blank Law & Technology traveled to Kentucky to perform an evidence preservation action with the assistance of law enforcement, cloning 12 hard disk drives and capturing 15 network server backup tapes.  The backup tapes were restored to hard disk drives and were indexed for keyword searching, which required circumvention of unknown passwords.  Blank Law & Technology assisted opposing counsel in conducting a privilege and relevancy sweep of electronic evidence.  After its review and production of non-privileged and responsive documents, the client law firm found thousands of pages of the former company’s documents on a low-level employee’s computer.  These documents had been deleted, but were still recoverable.  Blank Law & Technology attorneys then testified in a preliminary injunction hearing in Texas in which all electronic documents were admitted into evidence. 

APPROXIMATE COST: $120,000.00

  six

In the same Texas case, thousands of pages of deleted documents from a former employer were found on a low level employee’s hard disk drive.  This witness testified in deposition that she deleted the documents “months ago.”  Blank Law & Technology's expert engineer studied the data and concluded that the former employee’s documents could not have been deleted “months ago” because they would have been wholly or partially overwritten automatically by operation of the computer.  This expert testimony was presented in a preliminary injunction hearing.  In the same case, our expert engineer performed a critical software comparison analysis and expert testimony at trial. 

APPROXIMATE COST: $70,000.00

  seven

On a Thursday afternoon, a senior account manager of an international service business left to join the competition.  The account manager was responsible for an account worth tens of millions of dollars annually, and he indicated privately that he intended to take that account to his new position.  Concerned that the account manager had misappropriated confidential information, the former employer hired a veteran employment attorney at a national law firm.  The attorney retained Blank Law & Technology, who on Friday assisted with obtaining a Temporary Restraining Order and Order to Preserve Evidence.  On Monday, we visited the offices of the new employer and, with local law enforcement keeping the peace, made exact duplicates of certain hard disk drives and other storage media.  When these media were examined, they revealed that customer lists, pricing information, internal memoranda, and other trade secret and proprietary data had been taken from the former employer and loaded onto his new employer’s computer system.  The former employee’s protestations of innocence stopped abruptly and the case settled. 

APPROXIMATE COST: $10,000.00

  eight 

A law firm client left a voice mail message with our after-hours answering service requesting that we preserve the electronic documents that existed on a laptop computer’s hard disk drive on an emergency basis.  Blank Law & Technology appeared at a deposition the next morning where the witness and his attorney agreed to the cloning process.  We assisted the law firm that same week in forensic examination of the data through keyword searching and assisted in the production of electronic evidence in an admissible format. 

APPROXIMATE COST: $5,000.00