Examiner-led collection — when it has to survive a challenge
Firms call us at the hard moments: opposing counsel just challenged how your data was collected, an ESI deadline is bearing down, or a custodian’s phone holds the messages the review platform never ingested.
We are not a high-volume TAR platform — we are the named examiner who runs a defensible collection, preserves a documented chain of custody, reaches the mobile and deleted data the big platforms miss, and can testify to all of it.
Examiner-led early case assessment narrows the set before review — where most of the spend is — and we hand off clean load files to whatever review tool you already use.
E-discovery pairs with digital forensics and litigation support for attorneys when collection turns into investigation, and with the cybersecurity expert witness practice when findings need testimony.
Engagements are confidential and structured to begin within 48 hours of the consultation.
Some service tracks are offered at a fixed fee; complex investigations are billed hourlywith a clear scope, milestone updates, and a cap agreed up front.
Quinn (Founder and CEO) oversees every engagement and reviews every case before findings leave the practice; the practitioner team executes the technical work under her methodology.
- A direct line to Quinn, the founder — not a sales pipeline.
- Worked in-house by the examiner who scoped it.
- Explainable findings you can verify, with the methodology shown.
What this means for you
- Written scope before any work. You see a written scope — deliverables, timeline, and price — and approve it before we begin. You are never billed for work you did not authorize.
- We commit to findings, not outcomes. We tell you up front what the evidence can and cannot establish. Recovery, attribution, and prosecution are decided by banks, platforms, insurers, and courts — we produce the record they act on, and we put that distinction in writing.
- Every case is investigated, not just scanned. A credentialed examiner reviews every case before findings leave the practice. You get a documented investigation to court-admissible standards — not a single automated scan and a one-line answer.
- We will tell you if you do not need us. If a free or simpler step — a police report, an IC3 filing, a platform's own recovery flow — would resolve your situation, we point you there first.
Forensic ESI collection, source by source
The review-platform market owns the right side of the EDRM.
The left side — getting the data out of devices and accounts in a way that survives a challenge — is examiner work, and it is what we do.
What a defensible collection looks like per source:
- Devices (laptops, desktops, external media).Write-blocked imaging with two-hash verification — an acquisition hash at imaging and a verification hash on the working copy — so the production record shows the data analyzed is the data collected.
- Mobile.The messages that decide family-law, employment, and trade-secret matters rarely live in the mailbox. Forensic mobile extraction preserves the message databases with their metadata — see collecting text messages for e-discovery and the dedicated text-message evidence service.
- Cloud and SaaS (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace). Export paths that preserve message and file metadata, documented so the collection method itself is producible.
- Slack, Teams, and ephemeral messaging.Retention settings, export-tier differences, and disappearing-message features make this the easiest place to lose ESI without anyone deleting anything. We collect what the workspace tier actually retains and document what it never did — background: Slack, Teams, and ephemeral messaging in discovery.
- Remote collection.Most custodian collections run remotely with the custodian’s cooperation and counsel’s authorization — shipped evidence-grade kits for devices, supervised exports for accounts — chain of custody documented end to end.
Legal holds, preservation, and FRCP 37(e)
Collection defensibility starts before collection: identification and a hold that actually reaches the data.
We support counsel on the technical half of legal holds — which sources exist, what their retention behavior is, what a custodian’s phone will and will not preserve on its own — and on preservation letters that name real artifacts instead of boilerplate.
As general information: FRCP 26(f) is where ESI protocol and format get negotiated; FRCP 34 governs the production forms; and FRCP 37(e) frames what a court can do when ESI that should have been preserved is lost and cannot be restored.
When the question becomes whether the other side already failed that duty, that is a spoliation forensic analysis engagement.
Small-firm primer: the small-firm ESI guide.
How an engagement begins
- Confidential consultation. NDA-protected. 30-60 minutes. Direct conversation, no sales process.
- Scoped engagement. Written proposal with defined deliverables and pricing — fixed fee where it applies, hourly with milestone caps for open-ended investigations.
- Investigation and findings. Court-ready standards. Written report you can act on.
Why this work matters
In e-discovery the fight is often about how the data was collected, not just what it says — so the collection has to be defensible from the first byte.
Quinn holds 9 active certifications across GIAC — methodology trusted by Fortune 50 enterprises,defense contractors, and the attorneys who refer to us.
