Litigation Support Services

E-Discovery and Successfully Prosecuting Cyber Fraudsters

Monday, 23rd January 2017

With cyber crime dominating fraud trends in to 2017, the legal profession faces its own challenges in keeping up with the growing sophistication of fraud and in being able to identify the information needed as evidence in criminal or civil prosecutions. Simply understanding how crimes are committed and the trail of electronic evidence, requires specialist knowledge and tools.

With prosecution comes the risk of negative exposure

Cyber fraud isn’t just the exclusive domain of large coordinated criminal groups; internal company fraud is also a serious issue, such as when a fraud or data breach has been facilitated by an internal employee. The injection of a virus from a thumb drive or the collection of sensitive data that aids in breaching corporate security defences, are some scenarios to consider.

The stresses and strains of daily life and the privilege of position, makes employee data theft an increasingly tempting way for some to make ends meet. Often, the financial level of the crime may not be overly significant in comparison to much larger data breaches, giving rise to a dilemma: prosecute or just dismiss the employee. Facing the prospect of a publicly visible trial involving security lapses, not surprisingly, prosecution may not be the path of choice, with the company opting instead for dismissal. Not only that, but law enforcement authorities have precious few resources to investigate and getting their attention for smaller fraud cases is hard indeed.

E-Discovery / E-Disclosure as an outsourced litigation support service

Whether the crime is large or small, gathering the evidence to prosecute such a crime requires considerable specialised knowledge. Starting with how the event occurred and finishing with presenting a set of forensically viable evidence to a court, the process of achieving this is often beyond the skills or budget of many legal professionals acting on behalf of their clients.

E-Discovery (or E-Disclosure in Europe) is a specialised task, requiring a forensic approach to investigation to ensure that evidence gathered is first preserved intact and unaltered, followed by a methodical, systematic approach to uncovering the chain of events and those involved, unwitting or otherwise.

Perhaps it’s not that surprising that E-Discovery, as part of a package of litigation support services, is quite popular with legal firms around the country these days. Whereas many firms would, no doubt prefer to keep those actives in house as part of their own fee earning strategy, the incredible growth of cyber crime and its increasing sophistication, has made it almost impractical for all but the larger firms to retain this competence in-house.

As a law firm with valued clients facing the prospect on increasing numbers of cyber attacks, having a specialist cyber fraud investigations firm as a partner by your side is invaluable. Not only can they help with reactive, post event scenarios, but can also proactively assist in protecting against such events in the future.

Think about making that partner Blackhawk Intelligence.

Summary