It’s not like TV
One of the stories I like to tell people about working in Litigation Support is the conversation I had with someone shortly after I made the transition. Upon hearing my description of the job, and my reference to handling electronic evidence, I was asked if it was like when they do the computer forensics stuff on CSI.
Um, no not really. Aside from the fact that every computer forensic examiner probably kicks their TV when the CSI people go to a crime scene and turn on the computer sitting there, real life just isn’t that interesting. Or as I like to tell people, yeah every once in awhile I get to do some cool stuff like imaging hard drives, or collecting e-discovery, but nine times out of ten I’m doing really routine stuff that would bore you to death if they put in on TV. Things like getting clips from video of a leaky roof or cracked foundation. 🙂
This week has been a great example. I’ve been knee-deep in data analysis for a case. By data analysis I mean taking various spreadsheets with thousands and thousands of records, importing them to Access so I can run various queries on the raw data and cross reference them across the various spreadsheets, then exporting the query results back to Excel so I can use formulas like SUMIF and COUNTIF to quantify parts of the raw data into something meaningful. Literally, the only breaks I’ve gotten from this all week are the small, 15 minute, Summation imports that I’ve needed to do for other cases, and the hour long meeting spent discussing what data we needed to try and extract from all this raw data!
Sure, it makes for some nice billable hour totals this week, but it’s hardly something that would be interesting to show on TV.
Come to think of it, this doesn’t make for a very interesting blog post either. Can’t say I didn’t give you an honest picture of the job though!
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