Reviewing a police digital-forensic report
A practical starting point for solicitors assessing the link between a technical finding and the inference advanced in a matter.
Category
Practice notes
12 items from the laboratory.
When is independent digital-evidence review warranted?
Indicators that a focused forensic review may resolve a material uncertainty before a larger examination is commissioned.
What to clarify before instructing a digital-forensic expert
Define the disputed inference, required opinion, available material and deadline before the examination begins.
A timestamp is not a person: digital traces and attribution
Why recording an event, identifying its cause and attributing it to a person are separate forensic questions.
Why a collection of digital traces is not yet a timeline
Ordering records by time is a presentation step; reconstructing events requires attention to meaning, clocks, coverage and uncertainty.
Windows artefacts: looking beneath the tool report
The source record, operating-system behaviour and decoding assumptions matter as much as a report’s label.
What metadata can and cannot establish
Metadata can inform origin, timing and file history, but its source and processing history must be understood.
Digital forensic expert or cybersecurity expert?
Choose expertise by the evidentiary question, the underlying systems and the reasoning required, rather than the job title.
Tool output is not expert interpretation
A software report can organise records; an expert must explain the reasoning that connects those records to the question.
Logical acquisition versus full acquisition: why completeness matters
Acquisition labels describe methods, not a guarantee that every relevant record has been preserved or decoded.
When should the underlying artefacts be examined?
Go beneath a derivative report when the source, processing or interpretation could materially change the answer.
What a digital forensic expert witness does
From a defined technical question to a reasoned opinion, with clear limits and an independent role in the proceeding.