Criminal Investigation

Forget what you've seen on TV: Today's crime scene investigations often have less to do with smoking guns and DNA than with e-mails and PDAs (personal digital assistants). That's why Kroll Ontrack, headquartered in Eden Prairie, is setting the standard with its computer forensics services.

Data Recovery Specialists

Kroll Ontrack has been offering data recovery services since 1985. That's the company's core competency, and Kroll Ontrack is still the place companies call if the systems administrator comes to work one morning to discover that half the data have gone missing.

The company is so good at recovering data that it can find information on a hard drive that's been over-written up to a dozen times. That's led to a new specialty: recovering "e-evidence" - the e-mails and other electronic files that can be used as evidence in civil or criminal litigation.

Trillions and Trillions of E-Documents

The statistics are mind-boggling: In 2002, there were an estimated 3.25 trillion e-mails. E-mails and other electronic documents are stored on many different platforms, from computer hard drives, floppy disks and CD-ROMs to PDAs and even cell phones. More than 95 percent never get printed. Yet any one of them might be the evidence needed to win a case in court - or, better yet, reach a settlement before the trial.

Ben Allen, president of Kroll Ontrack, offers this example of how the two areas of business fit together: A few years ago, a Connecticut-based manufacturer called on the data recovery specialists after a suffering serious, mysterious loss of vital records. In the process of recovering the data, they discovered that the system had been deliberately sabotaged. Kroll Ontrack provided the evidence that pointed to the perpetrator. The Secret Service Plaque of Appreciation hangs prominently in the company's hallway.

Finding Electronic Treasure

It certainly sounds like an episode of CSI - but Ben Allen is quick to point out the difference: "We find the treasure, but we don't know what it's about." The technology workers specialize in understanding the client's information systems, capturing all relevant files, and turning them into a common, easy-to-use format. Then it's up to teams of attorneys to comb through the documents looking for the evidence that can make or break a case.

While some positions at Kroll Ontrack require a background in litigation, most require the skills of first-rate project management, systems administration and software engineering. To maintain the quality of the evidence, each file or document must be given a unique identification number and handled so that the metadata - date of creation, author, and date of the last access or modification - are preserved.

265,000 Potential Projects per Year

After a less-than-successful venture into the retail software business, Kroll Ontrack is determined to stick to its service-based business. "The case rulings are making it clear that e-evidence is necessary for doing discovery correctly," Allen says. "There are 265,000 civil litigations annually, and our service potentially applies to them all."

For a list of hot jobs in electronic evidence, go to: http://www.krollontrack.com/AboutUs/Careers/HotJobs/. For current articles by Kroll Ontrack's legal experts, go to: http://www.krollontrack.com/LawLibrary/Articles/.