With collections, it doesn’t always pay to get physical

Request

CCL was instructed by a law firm acting for their client in a property dispute. As part of the disclosure process, the law firm asked to review the contents of their client’s Gmail account and LinkedIn messages.

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Solution

• Initially the solicitor thought that sending the client’s mobile phone into the CCL labs for extraction was the best way to acquire the data. But having opted for CCL’s Fetch solution we were able to advise on a better strategy: to acquire cloud-based data directly from the source rather than the device.

• This is because a mobile phone typically stores only a small part of each email or applications data (like LinkedIn content); full contents are only downloaded on demand. The phone in question would therefore not have offered up the entire contents of the custodian’s Gmail mailbox.
• To ensure a thorough, security-sensitive recovery, we opted for a cloud collection method that negates the need for the custodian to provide us with their password - and cuts out any two-factor authentication hassles as well. Instead, a token is sent to the custodian, they enter their credentials, and a secure encrypted token is returned to our analysts. This is then entered into our collections software, making for a fast, frictionless extraction that safeguards private credentials.

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Outcome

Having advised on the potential limitations of collecting cloud-based data from physical devices, we switched to a cloud collection. This brought back a full data set from both sources for onward review, rather than partial and therefore evidentially incomplete sets.

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Find out more about CCL Fetch here

More like this: How CCL Fetch helped a large insolvency practice with remote data collection

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