John W. Simek is vice president of the digital forensics and security firm Sensei Enterprises. He is a nationally known expert in digital forensics and e-discovery. Before forming Sensei, Simek was a senior technologist for Mobil Oil Corporation, where he spent 20 years designing and troubleshooting the company’s networks throughout the Western Hemisphere. Simek is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), an EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCE) and holds multiple other technical certifications.
Ben Kusmin talks about the proper handling and format of spreadsheets.
In this legal technology podcast, Brian Wommack talks about the correct way to handle a data breach.
Denver Edwards discusses cybersecurity, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) cybersecurity framework.
In this legal podcast, Jim McCauley talks about ethical issues lawyers face and how the Virginia Bar is helping to educate lawyers on how to handle them.
The CEO of GlobalMac IT discusses how cybercrime has evolved and what Mac using lawyers can do to protect their information.
Sharon and John talk to Craig Ball about the intricacies of preserving digital evidence.
Guest Charles Patterson talks about TSCM and how this extra level of security can ensure a lawyer's private information stays private.
In this episode of Digital Detectives, Sprint's Joe Hamblin joins hosts Sharon Nelson and John Simek to discuss Smishing and other cyber security threats.
Executive orders on immigration, veterans initiative, the ABA Blueprint web tool, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, and Law Day 2017.
In this episode of Digital Detectives, hosts Sharon Nelson and John Simek discuss ransomware with the CEO of LMG Security, Sherri Davidoff.
On this Digital Detectives podcast, we discuss governmental cyber security policy under Obama and how policies might change under the Trump administration.
Executive producer Laurence Colletti interviews your favorite Legal Talk Network hosts about how they’re spending time during this holiday de jure
Sharon and John sit down with SiteLock President Neill Feather to discuss the importance of website security and data breaches in law firms.
Cindy Cohn discusses domestic surveillance, encryption technology, and how lawyers and law firms can protect themselves and their clients from cyber attacks.
Sharon Nelson and John Simek speak Jim Calloway about ways small firm and solo attorneys can improve their cyber security.
This time On the Road at the 2016 ABA Annual Meeting, hosts Sharon Nelson and John Simek speak with Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn, United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Federal Judge James Jones, and Chairman and Associate Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School Mohammed Hafez...
Board certified trial lawyer Craig Ball talks with Sharon and John about information technology competency and the 2016 Georgetown Ediscovery Training Academy.
Clark Hill PLC Of Counsel David G. Ries discusses data security, Mandiant’s M-Trends, and Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Reports.
Nuix Chief Technology Officer Stephen Stewart sits down with Sharon Nelson and John Simek to discuss the Panama Papers, the world’s largest data breach.
As technology continues to become ever more integrated into our daily lives, the challenges that law firms face grow and evolve. Many tech savvy clients are not only concerned with a lawyer’s ability to represent them but also their ability to protect their files and privileged communications. With more instances of data breaches and hacking...
Excel is a powerful tool that is often underutilized in law offices, but lawyers shouldn’t be intimidated by it. Hosts Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek interview ABA TECHSHOW 2016 presenters Ivan Hemmans and Allan Mackenzie about how beginners and experts can better use Excel to improve their law practice. The conversation opens with...
Are you looking for ways to improve your Mac skills to increase efficiency and productivity in your practice? In this Special Report, John W. Simek interviews Macintosh experts Katie Floyd, Jeff Schoenberger, and David Sparks about their presentation at ABA TECHSHOW 2016. The conversation opens with tips to help you better manage your email use,...
During the investigation of the San Bernardino shooting the FBI obtained a company iPhone that was used by Syed Farook, one of the assailants. The investigators obtained a warrant to search the phone, but it’s currently locked and the FBI hasn’t been able to access the encrypted data. This prompted the agency to request assistance...
Digital Detectives hosts Sharon Nelson and John Simek sit down with State Trial Court Judge Heather Welch and United States Magistrate Judge for the District of Minnesota Leo Brisbois in this Special Report to discuss the 2016 Judicial Clerkship Program. The goal of this program is to increase diversity in law clerk positions at court...
Digital Detectives hosts Sharon Nelson and John Simek stop by our table at the American Bar Association’s Meeting 2016 for a conversation about California’s water and drought issues with experts Meena Westford, Carolyn Angius, Elizabeth Clark, Heather Riley, and Michael Kiparsky. Together, they discuss the state’s 5 year water shortage and its impact on agriculture,...
InfraGard, one of the longest running outreach associations, represents a partnership between the FBI and the private sector. Members include businesses professionals (including many law firm employees), people from academic institutions, and local participants who share their experience and expertise with the FBI to assist in crime prevention. In the recent climate of rampant cyber...
Technology Assisted Review (TAR), also known as Computer Assisted Review, Predictive Coding, Computer Assisted Coding, and Predictive Ranking, has been around for 50 years, but is now becoming incredibly useful in the legal field. This technology can speed up cases of all kinds and greatly reduce discovery costs for their clients. But how do lawyers...
Following the terrorist attacks in Paris, French officials used metadata from a phone they found in a trashcan to gather information that made it possible to raid ISIS safe houses within a week. During these raids they were able to kill the suspected mastermind behind the operation, who was believed to be planning more attacks....
Although electronic discovery is increasingly important for court lawyers, only about 30 law schools nationwide offer e-discovery courses. To address the gap, Catalyst, an e-discovery service provider based out of Denver, has developed a practicum that aims to give law students the necessary experience to enter the workforce with adequate fundamental knowledge. So how does...
The Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) is a member organization that offers certification and a community for professionals working in the field of e-discovery, both in the public and private sectors. Recently, experienced e-discovery service provider and industry leader Mary Mack was named the executive director of ACEDS. What will change and what are...
“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business.” – Jason R. Baron to the New York Times On March 2nd, 2015, The...
“33% of Fortune 100 Organizations will experience an information crisis by 2017.” – Gartner, an information technology research and advisory firm Recently, data breaches have become one of the most serious threats to companies worldwide, and as more corporate infrastructure moves online, studies suggest that the rising number of data breaches will cost 2.1 trillion...
John M. Facciola is a retired United States Magistrate Judge who formerly served in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He has authored over 700 opinions, many of them in e-discovery and in the impact of information technology upon Fourth Amendment principles. With an inside knowledge of how e-discovery directly affects...
In a recent blog post, Canadian lawyer and legal technology blogger Nathaniel Russell defined Lawmageddon as “the imminent confluence of events that will change lawyers’ lives forever.” This most likely includes technologies such as cybersecurity, cloud-based systems, encryption, and social media, which influence the legal sphere in a way that lawyers cannot opt out of....
Many of our listeners will know the term Technology-Assisted Review (TAR) by it’s more common nickname, “predictive coding.” Lawyers and judges alike need to pay attention to TAR due to potential changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) coming up in December 2015. And since almost all courts accept when lawyers utilize TAR...
Legal Talk Network producer Laurence Colletti interviews Digital Detectives and The Digital Edge host Sharon Nelson, Digital Detectives host John Simek, The Kennedy-Mighell Report host Dennis Kennedy, and ABA Journal: Asked and Answered host Stephanie Francis Ward at the 2015 ABA TECHSHOW. Each host briefly explains the topics discussed in their podcast and discusses preparation...
From self-driving cars and drones to robotic surgeons and soldiers, humans are delegating more tasks to machines and software. But who is responsible when then these new innovations cause damage, injury, or death? Can we trust machines to prioritize preserving human life when accidents inevitably occur? Should we be thinking about sweeping regulations? In this...
There have been several programs looking at exoneration of people previously convicted of crimes. This includes The Innocence Project, currently boasting 325 DNA exonerations, and a project of the University of Michigan Law School that works on cases in which DNA is unavailable. The latter project had exonerated 1,553 individuals when we recorded this podcast....
Digital Detectives hosts Sharon Nelson and John Simek interview Andrew Schpak and Lacy Durham about the ABA Young Lawyers Division at the 2015 ABA Midyear Meeting. As chair of the division, Schpak discusses his plans for the year, future meetings, his health and wellness initiative, and his public service project in Portland called Project Street...
Joe Looby recently released his documentary The Decade of Discovery about the United States versus Philip Morris tobacco lawsuit in the early 2000s and email e-discovery issues. The film also discusses the emergence of the Sedona Conference as a think tank and forum for discussion about cooperation in e-discovery. Many prominent federal judges were interviewed...
In November of 2014, hackers infiltrated Sony’s computer network lifting terabytes of corporate data, human resources information, internal intel, films, corporate emails, and other valuable information. This led the corporate world to question how protected we really are from cyber attacks. In the 1990’s, the only computer issue was viruses, but the attack vectors have...
As lawyers, we hear a lot about the technological advances in e-discovery and information governance. How do you describe the current state of e-discovery from an opportunity and growth perspective, and how does this market opportunity impact the pulse rate of mergers, acquisitions, and investments? For lawyers purchasing e-discovery packages, there are several types of...
“A cyber attack on the World Trade Center would be 10 times more financially damaging than the 2001 attack.” Data breaches like the ones at Target, JP Morgan, and Home Depot have recently been all over the news and are usually organized by hackers working towards financial gain. But there is cyber war happening with military...
Discovery, as all lawyers know, is the process of collecting and exchanging information about the court case to prepare for the trial. Traditionally, this was done by many lawyers over countless billable hours in which every page of potential evidence was examined for important information. Because of this, the more information existed in reference to...
In 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure rule-makers developed and put into practice amendments dealing with electronically stored information (ESI) and e-discovery. However, most of those involved believed these amendments did not adequately deal with lost or missing ESI or “the spoliation issue.” In 2014 the rule-makers proposed Rule 37(e), which deals with the...
Despite all the attention that e-discovery has received over the last decade, it is still a relatively new part of the litigation process. For those lawyers who were never exposed to e-discovery in law school or their formative years of practice, the systems and products involving data collection and analysis can be overwhelming and complex....
Every law firm can run into incidents of employee misconduct, data breaches, and intellectual property theft. In the age of modern technology, data breaches, insider trading, and other security problems require extensive technological forensics. Partners and firm owners, as well as lawyers working within the firm, need to understand why a digital investigation is needed,...
All lawyers have an ethical obligation to employ security measures when sharing information and data with their clients. Whether that means encrypting all important emails or properly researching cloud based file-sharing services like Dropbox, it is incumbent on lawyers to understand the levels of security available. LexisNexis recently did a survey on what tools lawyers...
On February 12th of 2008, the FBI announced that it had hired Lockheed Martin to build its Next Generation Identification system (NGI) to deploy multimodal matching to biometric data of US citizens. Today, NGI’s database contains several types of unique identifiers including fingerprints, iris prints, and facial recognition. On this episode of Digital Detectives, hosts...
Some experts believe that, in addition to being prohibitively expensive for law firms to manage, maintaining immense amounts of client data increases the probability that it will be exposed to the public through a security breach or hack. That is why many like-minded firms are outsourcing data management to companies that specialize in it. On...
Some technology experts believe it’s not a matter of if law firm communications can be hacked, but when. With continuing reports of the NSA and foreign entities monitoring the privileged attorney-client communications of US law firms, lawyers may be required to take additional measures to protect client information. On this edition of Digital Detectives, hosts...
From malware and hackers to BYOD and TYOD, the biggest threat to law firm data could be the attorneys themselves. On this episode of Digital Detectives, hosts Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek interview data expert Ben M. Schorr and discover complex new threats to data security and the simplest solutions to reduce them....
In this edition of Digital Detectives hosts Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek invite Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration to discuss Information Governance as it relates to e-discovery, privacy, record keeping and security. Baron connects the dots between all these areas and helps lawyers...
The Honorable John M. Tran uses the terms digital natives and digital immigrants when referring to judges. Coined by author Marc Prensky, digital natives are those born into technology and digital immigrants are learning the field as they go. It’s not uncommon for judges to be digital immigrants, forcing them to confront issues on the...
