Craig Ball
4 June 2019 (Paris, France) — Most of what I learned about computer and digital forensics came from an intensive course offered by Stroz Friedberg. But I did not begin to understand forensics until I started to read Craig Ball.
For the newbies, Craig Ball is a trial lawyer, computer forensic examiner, law professor, and noted authority on electronic evidence … and the pen behind the award-winning “Ball in Your Court” column on electronic discovery. He is one of the most respected brainiacs in the industry.
And it was not just what I read … deep reads with easy-to-follow-logic, brilliant explanation of concepts with which not everybody is familiar … but because we are of the same mind, write about the same things. We stand at the inception of a very unique revolution. We have moved from millenniums of information exchange that were executed on physical access to a medium on which data had to be copied, to an era of ubiquitous, instantaneous, frictionless flow of all information at once.
This has had a profound, irreversible and sometimes destabilizing effect on lawyers, which is much discussed at a legal technology event appropriately titled LegalTech which is held in New York every January or February, and where we captured the video interview below. Because Craig … a lawyer and leading light in the legal ecosystem … takes the long, holistic approach to technology. As he has noted :
The thing about technology is our perceived scale of space and time: it is collapsing more rapidly than the pace at which society and industries can adapt. And I do not mean just in the legal arena, of course. Just read the headlines. There is a massive source of system and social stress, dominated by negativity such as fake news and data abuses. Although one hopes for some promise on the horizon, perhaps a new dynamic in the political landscape. We’ll see.
Craig agreed to become the fourth member of our video series “The ones to watch”, a look at some of the stars in the world of e-discovery and information governance.
Craig’s interview knocked the socks off my video crew, as well as many attendees at Legalweek who had a chance to listen to and watch the interview in progress. We spent 45 minutes with Craig and he really “tells it like it is” on the current state of discovery, forensics and the state of the legal industry.
And how do you edit 45 minutes when every minute is illuminating? So what we decided to do is to edit the clips and show Craig at his very best as he tells us … in his now well-known and amusing way … how he got involved in law and technology (“to keep from going to jail”), how he started building and programming computers (“it snowballed!”), his passion to share his knowledge of technology by “speaking lawyer”, and how each of us is so “instrumented, much like the astronauts of the past”.
When we edit videos we like to insert text and graphics throughout to highlight the interviewee’s points, and to break up the visual so it does not become tiring. But for this video we think the interviewee does such a bang up job just laying it all out (being so animated in telling the story) that we dropped inserts. The interview is composed of 5 segments:
1. In the opening segment, Craig tells us how he started in the law and computer technology and how that led to teaching roles as well as becoming a certified computer forensic examiner and electronic evidence expert.
2. In this next clip, Craig tells us how forensics (and the law) is changing by first taking us in a short trip in the “Waaaay Back Machine” to give us a little perspective. And his thoughts on how proper forensics discovery should be handled today. Especially in dealing with “the cloud”.
3. This year, Craig launched Legalweek with one of his brilliant “Fireside chats”, what is becoming a tradition at Legalweek. This year it was a chat with Bob Woodward, the legendary American investigative journalist best known for his work with Carl Bernstein in doing much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal that led to the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. In this segment, Craig talks about the thrill and satisfaction of doing these chats.
4. Craig publishes a wealth of information. In this segment he reviews where to find his material.
5. We end with Craig’s biggest beef. That the legal technology market, especially for e-discovery, misses 80% of the litigation that drives American justice today. His thoughts, as always, illuminate.
We created a second video that captures Craig’s thoughts on mobile forensics, a branch of digital forensics relating to recovery of digital evidence or data from a mobile device be it mobile phones, PDA devices, GPS devices or tablet computers. But that will be our video lead in a special post-in-progress on eDiscovery in digital forensic investigations.
We hope you enjoy the chat (for other interviews in this series, see links below the video):
For the other interviews in this series:
* A video chat with Rob Robinson (click here)
* A video chat with Ron Friedmann (click here)
* A video chat with Chris Dale (click here)