GDF handles digital evidence for civil litigation, criminal matters, employment disputes, internal reviews, insurance claims, and incident response. Work can begin in Manhattan, the outer boroughs, Long Island, or Westchester, then scale across the firm's national and international coverage. The assignment is defined before collection: systems in scope, volatile data, preservation risk, deadlines, and the questions the record must answer.
Collection comes before interpretation
A useful opinion depends on a preserved source. Examiners identify the device, account, cloud tenant, log source, backup, or business application that holds the relevant record. They record acquisition settings, dates, time zones, access conditions, hashes, and custody transfers. That defensible chain of custody lets another qualified examiner follow what happened without relying on memory or a screenshot.
The plan accounts for practical New York constraints: short return dates, emergency applications, distributed custodians, apartment or home-office devices, and enterprise systems controlled by a third party. Remote collection may be appropriate for some sources. Other sources require on-site work or laboratory imaging.
Analysis tied to a disputed fact
The objective is not to produce a pile of artifacts. It is to test a proposition. That may require correlating file-system records, email headers, cloud audit logs, mobile app databases, authentication events, USB history, geolocation limits, or deletion activity. Findings distinguish observed fact, technical inference, and information supplied by a client.
Counsel receives documented digital-forensics work in a form suited to the matter: a preservation memorandum, chronology, technical report, declaration support, demonstrative, or expert witness testimony. Scope and terminology are adjusted for Frye/Daubert challenge readiness without overstating what any artifact can prove. Courts determine admissibility; GDF supplies the technical foundation and does not provide legal advice.
- Forensic acquisition of computers, phones, email, cloud accounts, and removable media
- Deleted-file, activity, timeline, metadata, and provenance analysis
- Privilege-aware coordination with counsel and eDiscovery teams
- Independent replication, rebuttal, and neutral technical examination
The examination record behind the conclusion
A defensible engagement retains more than a final report. The working record can include source inventories, authorization, custody forms, acquisition logs, hash values, tool and version information, time-zone decisions, search criteria, query history, exception notes, validation results, screenshots used for explanation, and the path from an artifact to a stated conclusion.
Not every matter requires the same volume of documentation. The record is scaled to the dispute and expected use, but a reviewer should be able to identify what was examined, what was excluded, which method produced a result, and which judgment belonged to the examiner rather than the software.
- Source and custodian inventory with scope status
- Acquisition, export, hash, error, and custody records
- Artifact tables and normalized event chronologies
- Search, filtering, query, and reconciliation history
- Method validation, contrary testing, and stated limitations
Corroboration across devices, cloud systems, and business records
The most useful fact may not be on the device named in the complaint. A file-copy question can require endpoint artifacts, Microsoft 365 events, a cloud-drive revision history, USB records, source-control logs, and business access data. An authenticity question can require the native message, tenant records, a sender device, and the receiving system rather than a printed copy.
GDF maps those sources before assuming that one artifact resolves the issue. Agreement among independent records can strengthen a conclusion. Conflicts can reveal time-zone errors, platform processing, shared credentials, incomplete collection, or another explanation that must be addressed before reporting.
A technical role, clearly bounded
GDF explains systems, records, methods, and limitations. The firm does not decide what a law requires and does not provide legal advice. Counsel controls legal strategy, discovery positions, and filings. That division keeps the technical record focused and reduces the chance that advocacy outruns the evidence.