Case Studies

On a recent Saturday, D4 undertook the feat to prove that the client owned certain knowledge and features of the design and engineering of a particular product. Outside counsel contacted D4 to determine whether forensic expertise was available to establish the creation dates and last saved dates of some of the client’s earliest electronic files that were critical to establishing its patent claim.

A large European corporation was involved in patent litigation. Hundreds of custodians needed to be interviewed and electronic data had to be collected pursuant to a discovery request. The custodians were located throughout the United States and Europe.

An international corporation was accused of unfair employment practices. The suit claimed that the corporation had been engaging in these activities for years. The corporation was asked to produce relevant data regarding their hiring and promotion practices over a period of 20 years. Potentially relevant data was not only stored in e-mail systems and file servers but in outdated legacy databases as well.

A small technology company accused the defendant of not paying invoices that had been submitted over a 12 month period. The defendant claimed that they never received any invoices until the suit was filed. The defendant also claimed that due to the invoices being submitted years after the work had been completed there was no way to verify the work that had been done or match that work to the invoices.

An individual was accused by his former employer of possessing and using customer lists and other proprietary and confidential information to steal business shortly after being hired by a competing organization. The defendant did return some data but it was after he had been employed at the new company for over a month. It also believed that the defendant still maintained some confidential and proprietary information.

A man attempting to download movies, using a popular file sharing program, was sued by a major movie studio for illegally possessing over 5 feature length films. The defendant claimed that he did attempt to download one movie but it never completed and crashed his hard drive, rendering his computer inoperable. To recover from the crash the defendant reformatted his hard drive.