More and more, evidence is gathered from computers, be it in litigation or in criminal cases such as fraud. The growth in computer technology has had significant impact on the volumes of discoverable information in civil litigation and the evidential possibilities in criminal cases.

Over 90% of all business documents are now created electronically and it is estimated that somewhere between 35% and 70% of these documents are never converted into paper documents. As an indication of how much paper volume we would be talking about: a 1.44 mega bite (old fashioned) floppy disk is the equivalent of around 720 written pages of plain text. A CD Rom of 650 mega bite can hold up to 325.000 pages of plain text, a one Giga bite memory stick up to 500.000. An average server of 120 Giga bite could therefore easily hold the equivalent of 50 million pages of of printed text.

The categories of electronically stored information are almost endless:

• emails and email attachments
• instant messages
• word processing files
• spreadsheets
• database files
• program files
• financial and accounting files
• human resources files
• internet and internet history files
• temporary files
• intranet files
• cache files
• cookies
• graphic files
• log files
• multi media files
• desktop faxes
• voice mail messages
• back up files
• digitised hard copy documents such as scanned documents
• slack space data and deleted documents

As a result, computer forensic services have significantly grown in terms of market share in the industry. However electronic discovery and evidence gathering also brought a host of challenges for lawyers and IT forensic specialists. The current High Court Rules have been designed to deal with paper documents and do not provide proper guidance (yet) as to e-requests and e-discovery obligations. Leading cases in this respect are the cases in the US whereby computer forensics have been battled over in Court with sometimes drastic sanctions where potential defaults were identified.

John Dierckx himself has a vast experience and  certification in dealing with (potential) computer forensic evidence and is available for strategic advice in this area. In addition to this a close relationship exists with New Zealand Forensics. As a result we are able to offer clients, forensically correct investigations and evidence. New Zealand Forensics is a market leader and have successfully been involved in several cases.