Why Law Firms Shouldn’t do Forensics

Here’s a good reason why law firms, even when they have qualified people in house, shouldn’t get started in the business of forensic collections. You never, ever have every hard drive connector you need. With all the various types of drives in use now in laptops, (IDE, SATA, Ultra-ATA/PATA, Zif connectors, SSD drives) let alone all the various types of smartphones or netbooks on the market now, or that will be coming on the market, there’s simply no way a business that doesn’t have collection as it’s main focus is going to be able to keep up with all the different types of equipment and know-how required to do the job.

Personally, I’ve had a couple of laptop drives come in over the last couple of years that I simply don’t have a connector for, and had never really worked with.

Since law firm’s IT personnel are not just in the forensics business, they won’t be able to do every type of collection. If they have to explain why they can collect one type of drive, but not another, to an attorney who has no idea there are different types of drives, who then has to go back and explain to a client why they had to pay for a vendor for this drive, but not that one, things are not going to go smoothly. It’s probably better to just avoid it altogether.

At least that’s my opinion. 🙂

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