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Hamilton & Associates, Lawyers > Products Liability > Unlock & Find Hidden Electronic Computer Files for Drug Error & Defective Product Claims

How to Unlock & Find Hidden Electronic Computer Files

for Drug Error & Defective Product Claims

Drug errors are all too common in medical treatment.  Mistakes cause Stevens – Johnson Syndrome.  Extravasation errors can lead to amputation.  Anti-coagulant drug errors can kill. Defective Products are hidden by the manufacturer and retailer.

The evidence of drug error malpractice is often stored electronically.  All businesses communicates and stores files electronically, in the modern world.  The medical-pharmaceutical industry relies particularly on electronic records.

It is normal to expect people to protect themselves and their jobs.  It is expected for people to hide their errors.  Businesses hide their mistakes, even when others are harmed.  Too often, individuals commit unethical acts on behalf of their employers; unethical acts they would not do to protect themselves.  This article teaches how to uncover electronic evidence others believe is deleted for drug error and defective product lawsuits.

Types of Electronic Records Containing Drug Error Evidence

Lawsuits are a search for the truth.  A drug error attorney must know how to uncover the truth from those seeking to hide it.  Drug error business records exist on electronic servers; often invisible to the naked eye.  These records include files, such as:

  • Email correspondence
  • Private correspondence
  • Business documents
  • Spreadsheets
  • Presentations
  • Testing data
  • Prescription histories
  • The drug mistakes
  • The cover up of the drug mistakes

This field is known as Electronically Stored Information or “E.S.I.”

Companies tend to forget what they store electronically.  Wrongdoers tell lies, presuming they have deleted the truth.

How Electronic Files Are Stored

Think of computer file storage as a book.  Books contain a table of contents, the pages themselves, an index, and perhaps a bibliography.  “Deleting” an electronic file does not erase the data within that file.  That information is still stored on a computer disk.  The act of deleting a file only removes a “pointer” that the computer uses to find that particular information’s location on the disk.  The “disk” can be:

  • a flash memory card,
  • a hard drive on a desktop computer, or
  • many other forms of storage.

The key is that the data you are looking for continues to exist until it is both deleted and written over by the computer.

What Happens When You Press Delete?

When one presses delete on a computer, there is a data entry on the disk’s directory.  This directory indicates each file as either “used” or “not used.” This status change tells the computer either it has permission to write over the data or it does not have permission to write over the data.

Either way, that data continues to exist until it is written over or the disk is physically destroyed.  Because of this, investigators can recover data thought buried or lost even many years into the past.  Insiders call this “residual data.”  It is there until it is written over.

Think back to our analogy of a computer file like a written book.  If I pull out the table of contents and burn it, the pages are still there.  If I pour ink over the bibliography, I can still read the book.  If I erase the contents of the index, the book’s story remains.  It is just more difficult to find.  This is where the experts come in.

The Critical Importance of Emails To Drug Error Cases

People are More Candid When E-Mailing

Emails and their cousins, text messaging, instant messaging and social media, are particularly important for drug error lawsuits.  These electronic communications are by their nature informal.  Many employees will speak their mind and disclose information they would rather keep secret in an email but never in a formal memorandum or business document.  This is ironical because the email is invariably a business document and much more difficult to destroy.

People With Fewer Filters Use E-mail

Furthermore, nearly all employees have business email.  However, the formal memorandums and documents from departments are often filtered through several layers of the corporate management.  Because of this, the people writing emails are much more likely to admit the truth and discuss it, not knowing it may later be revealed.  They might not even know of the cover up.

E-Mails Have a Smaller Radar Signature

Emails are also more likely to be overlooked.  Because of the low corporate rank of many email authors, as well as their abundance; they often miss out on later corporate attempts to hide the truth in a drug error case.

Why Are Emails So Difficult To Delete?

Multiple E-Mail Copies

Email correspondence is difficult or impossible to entirely eradicate.  Multiple copies are typically sent to various people.  This means the same correspondence is on multiple devices, computers, and servers.  There are even “blind copies” that may be sent out without others knowing.

E-Mails are Backed-Up

Emails are also backed up as a matter of policy.  These backups exist on multiple users’ computer systems.  When further backups occur, backup programs tend to take the most robust version of the backup; meaning the erased e-mails may be sent back to the main database.

Many People are Copied on E-Mails

Multiple edited copies of emails may exist.  Each version of the email may be contained in a separate file and therefore may be discovered.

People Overlook E-Mail Permanence

Business executives often do not realize their emails create a semi-permanent record.  Some treat emails as merely another form of verbal office banter.  They assume after they delete the email from their own eyesight, it is deleted from computer storage entirely.  Even email communication that is intentionally created as temporary (think Snapchat) leaves a permanent trail that can be recovered and used.

How Do Drug Error Law Firms Find Hidden Electronic Information?

E.S.I. or electronically stored information includes secret hidden data within it.  This is known by many names:

  • Hidden data
  • Embedded data
  • Metadata

This secret hidden information contained in every file is a means by which deleted and hidden electronic files can be recovered.

What Metadata Reveals

Hidden Metadata contains information on the location and basic aspects of various versions of a file.  It can contain who authored it.  It can contain file size.  It contains file location.  It contains the identity of the computer that created it.  Metadata can even reveal who opened and viewed the E.S.I.

Metadata or “embedded data” is often even more valuable than physical evidence.  This is because it is more difficult to alter.  It is more difficult to hide or fake.

Think of a physician who denies he saw prescription language for an antibiotic allergy, prescribes the antibiotic anyways, and causes Stevens – Johnson Syndrome in some poor victim.

The physician may deny seeing a physical prescription.  However, Metadata may reveal that the physician opened the antibiotic allergy disclosure, viewed the allergy disclosure, as well as the date, time, and computer he used to do so.  Such invaluable information not only would reveal the truth but also be persuasive to a drug error trial jury.

How Bad Guys Hide Electronic Information And How To Find It.

Expect for the party that committed the drug error or its insurer to try to hide or disguise electronic information of the wrongdoing.  The following techniques are used:

Print And Forget

Defendants will offer to print out on physical paper the electronic files.  First, this eliminates Metadata and prevents you from discovering useful information contained within it.  It also hides their methods of obtaining the data, meaning more may be found that is not revealed in the physical printout.

This is a technique where they don’t intentionally hide information.  They merely use an ineffective means of retrieving it and therefore it never reaches you.

The Changing File Types Shell Game

Drug error defendants may offer to convert electronically stored information to .tif files or .pdf files.  This is because .tif imaging and Adobe .pdf files do not contain the Metadata stored within them.  ‘

Since you cannot retrieve that data; you cannot use it against them at trial.

Hiding The Method

Any math student will know that to pass an exam they need to show the teacher their work.  That is because it possible to guess an answer to a mathematics problem, or cheat off someone else and merely write down the answer.  By showing your work, you can display your mastery of the subject.

So too, drug error defendants will not fully reveal the method by which they extract electronic data.  By hiding their method, the drug error lawyer cannot determine whether the drug defendant’s method was what was agreed upon, whether the method was an effective means of searching, or whether the method covered all sources.  Drug error lawyers  must insist upon transparency on the method used.

Narrowly Construing Search Terms

Defendants seeking to hide electronic information may insist upon search parameters that are too narrow to find all of the pertinent drug error information.

In addition, they may request search terms that are too few in number.  By asking too few questions of the computer; the computer gives too few answers.

How To Avoid Drug Error Electronic Information Hiding Techniques

It will be impossible for a drug error victim or lawyer to stay entirely up to date on electronic means of hiding, deleting, or altering evidence.  I recommend realizing your shortcomings and hiring professionals to define the method and terms of the search and also carry out its implementation.

Such firms use software known as “predictive coding” and “technology assisted review programs” to effectively seek out the truth and reveal the drug error evidence.

Remember; you are typically fighting a professional, large corporation.  This will not be its first drug error lawsuit.  be aggressive and target your efforts to reveal the truth on their weaknesses.  This is because you will have less experience with its computers, techniques and methods.  You will have fewer resources.  Use its size, confidence, and lies against it.  Good luck and may you uncover the truth.

Author:

Matt Hamilton of Hamilton & Associates, Lawyers

  • Juris Doctor
  • Trial Attorney

 

 

 

 

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