Author Archives: aliciapenn

Discovery Diagnostic: When You Should Ask the Government to Produce Discovery in its Original Format

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By Alicia Penn and Sean Broderick

Members of our team have noticed an uptick in the U.S. Attorneys’ offices use of eDiscovery review platforms such as Everlaw, Relativity, and Ipro Eclipse to produce discovery to defense teams.

If these types of productions do not cause you problems and you can open, search, and review discovery when provided in this way, you can stop here and skip the rest of this post.

However, if you open your discovery and find the text for an email in one spot, the metadata for the email in another spot, and the images associated with the email somewhere else with no way to realistically put them back together, read on, my friend, we are in this together.

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Guide: 4Sight UCM Package Explorer

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By Alicia Penn and Nelson Garcia

In a case with wiretaps[1] or pen register trap and trace[2] discovery from phone calls or messages, the government may produce the data to you using Package Explorer. Package Explorer is a proprietary viewer that will let you view the data exported from 4Sight UCM, a program used by law enforcement to process information from phones.

You will know you’ve received a Package Explorer file because it will most often look like this:

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Guide: IPRO Eclipse Publish Case-troubleshooting

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By Alicia Penn and Alex Roberts

You may notice when in Eclipse Publish some buttons are blank or the text may look very small. Sometimes restarting the program will be enough to make the buttons populate. Another option is checking the compatibility mode for the program. The compatibility mode helps synchronize Eclipse’s display with your computer’s capabilities. Think trying to run a high-resolution game on a low-resolution computer—the quality of the graphics you experience is not as good as when you run a high-resolution game on a high-resolution computer. Fortunately, the steps to address this in Eclipse are straightforward.

First, Find the Eclipse Publish file and display its properties. Right-click on the LaunchViewer.exe file (the spinny football icon that you use to open the database), and select Properties. The Properties window will look like this, and the tab you want is the Compatibility tab. Click on it.

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Rule 16.1: A proactive e-discovery tool

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By Alicia Penn

Recently a defense team asked for help with reviewing their discovery. It was a single PDF made up of over 18,000 documents and contained no bookmarks or index. The discovery letter accompanying the production looked like this:

This letter was completely useless to the defense team trying to review the discovery. It gave no information that could be used in searching or organizing. The only thing it conveyed is that 18,686 individual pages had been produced to defense counsel. Without an index or bookmarks, there was no simple way to quickly and completely identify reports, witness statements, etc.  

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Legal Bytes: US v. Masood-District of Maryland 2025–Slow Production Leads to Dismissal

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By Alicia Penn

TL:DR [1]: This one is fun, read it

The government charged Masood with a 3-million dollar conspiracy to defraud the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center[2]. He along with 7 other codefendants were indicted in April 2022. Evidence included 30 electronic devices from different homes and Google search warrant returns of defendants’ email accounts.

Although the Government had all of the devices within their control and the search warrant returns early on in the case, they took 2 ½ years to actually produce that discovery to the defense. Along the way they claimed the voluminous nature of the discovery made filter review difficult, the data was too large to download in-house, they were having internal IT difficulties, they were working on negotiating pleas, the original AUSA left.

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