Here’s how digital forensics can help solve personal injury cases

If society has learned one thing over the past several years since the introduction of the smart phone, it’s that data is everywhere. Long gone are the days when data was mostly on your home PC or laptop computer. 

Now, everyone carries a microcomputer in their pocket, tracking their every move. Even better, it’s equipped with a camera capable of taking pictures and video in high-definition and a microphone for recording audio along with video or as a stand-alone feature. Smart phones are documenting machines. If they weren’t, companies wouldn’t seek to have you put apps on them to be able to market products to you. They document not for safety or security, but to make big data companies and retailers lots and lots of money.

But this fact has an ancillary benefit for the professionals in digital forensics. It means that the micro-computer that is tracking your moves in order to market certain products to you also stores valuable evidence for use in investigation and litigation. SMS and WhatsApp messages, pictures, videos, notes, voicemail, call logs, web history and more are all extremely valuable pieces of evidence that may be obtained from smart phones.

If you’ve never thought about it before, think now about how much you use your smart phone and what you use it for. Then, think about all the high-tech tracking devices it has installed in it -- GPS, cellular antennas, wireless internet antennas and Bluetooth. All of these things leave a digital trace in the form of metadata on your device and can be retrieved by most mobile forensic tools and analysed and reported by a competent examiner. It’s a digital mountain of information that most users can’t access or even realize is present on their device… All you have to do is ask for it!

So, now that you know what is accessible on the device, how can you use it to benefit your case? First, it’s important to realize that the “CSI Effect” is an actual phenomenon. To believe that we can extract data that will be the smoking gun in your case is (mostly) not realistic. However, if you take the totality of the circumstances in your case, to include the digital forensic findings, the data that we can retrieve may very well paint a much clearer picture of what was going on in your case.

The best example in personal injury cases is texting-while-driving, which is a big deal in motor vehicle crash personal injury cases these days. Most personal injury attorneys would love to have proof that the opposing party was texting at the moment of the collision. Unfortunately, that’s probably not realistic.

However, what we can show is the activity leading up to that collision. For example, if the opposing party was on their way home from work and we know this to be a 20 minute commute and the collision happened 7 minutes into the drive, that’s one piece of the puzzle. If they were involved in a text conversation prior to and during that 7 minutes directly leading up to the collision, that’s another piece.

If they were also searching for places to order pizza on their mobile internet for when they got home, that’s yet another piece. All of these instances are recorded on the device with dates and times and sometimes, specific location. In the case of Facebook Messenger, messages that are sent routinely have the geo-location (latitude & longitude) of where the person was when the message was sent, providing a message-by-message diagram of where they were, proving that they were in fact texting-while-driving directly prior to that collision. What’s even better, this information can’t be deleted or altered by most end-users.

Texting-while-driving is probably the most universally understood example of the value of digital forensics in personal injury cases, but it’s just one example. The overall point is, if you have any evidence that a mobile device was involved in the injury of another, it pays to call a digital forensic consultant as soon as you know, such as DLA Digital Forensics today! It’s best for the client, it’s best for you and it helps everyone get on with their lives much quicker in the wake of what may have been a tragic accident.