ACEDS - eDiscovery Executive Certificate

Earlier this month, ACEDS announced a new program, the eDiscovery Executive Certificate. The description given on the ACEDS site, is not entirely clear about the nature of this program. The word, 'executive' makes it appear as though it may be a program for an advanced e-discovery specialist - a more rigorous review of an individual's qualifications than ACEDS's Certified E-Discovery Specialist program.

I called ACEDS today and confirmed that his program is actually a scaled down version of the main CEDS program. It covers less material, and should be easier for a legal professional to pass. I was specifically told that ACEDS does not recommend that current Certified eDiscovery Specialists take this exam.

The executive program includes a series of lectures, covering trial techology, forensics, AI, and social media. CLE credit is available for several states.

What is Forensically Sound Evidence?

'Forensically sound' is a term widely used in digital forensics and electronic discovery. A 'forensically sound copy' may be required for ESI to be admissible in court.

Rodney McKemmish is a former director of KPMG Forensic. His chapter "When Is Digital Evidence Forensically Sound?" for Advance in Digital Forensics IV, provides a precise definition of the term. See, McKemmish, R., 2008, in IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 285; Advances in Digital Forensics IV; Indrajit Ray, Sujeet Shenoi; (Boston: Springer), pp. 3–15, available at, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-0-387-84927-0_1.pdf . McKemmish reviews several authorities, including NIST’s Disk Imaging Tool Specification, and the Department of Justice's guide Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations. He gives four criteria for the term:

1. Has the meaning and, therefore, the interpretation of the electronic evidence been unaffected by the digital forensic process?

The binary data can not be changed. It will not necessarily matter that dates and times are displayed in different formats than are shown for the original data.

2. Have all errors been reasonably identified and satisfactorily explained so as to remove any doubt over the reliability of the evidence?

A forensic examiner has to identify and document errors in the process. Any changes must be accounted for. For example I/O errors should be recorded. These are Input/Output actions (e.g., reading or copying data) in accessing disks and drives.

3. Is the digital forensic process capable of being independently examined and verified in its entirety?

An audit trail should be created that outside parties can review.

4. Has the digital forensic analysis been undertaken by an individual with sufficient and relevant experience?

Only specialists should acquire the evidence.

Review of iConect XERA Electronic Discovery Platform

You can get a free 60 day trial version of iConect's XERA electronic discovery platform here. The platform is pre-loaded with documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy. iConect XERA has a very basic layout . .

. . but it does give you ability to navigate through a large document set and filter and sort through metadata associated with the documents . . .

. . .and perform advanced searching.

The search form is structured to remind the user to run searches on keyword variations.

Another distinctive feature of the platform (absent in Concordance or Relativity) is that the default layout gives a list of documents which either have the same date or the same name as the current document.

This encourages a reviewer to consider related documents which don't fall within the results of keyword search. The user can select documents from these lists and compare them to the document being viewed.

iConect XERA's design does not make it appear to be the most advanced document review platform but it does include useful features not available in Concordance or all Relativity workspaces that can facilitate document review.