Category Archives: Process

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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GridPlayer: A Free Multi-View Video Playback Tool

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By Nelson Garcia

If you’ve ever needed to play multiple videos at once GridPlayer is an ideal tool. For example, you might want to review footage from several camera angles of the same event.  GridPlayer will let you do that, and it is free and simple to use.

GridPlayer displays videos in a side-by-side layout and supports simultaneous playback. The number of videos you can load depends on your computer’s graphics capabilities and screen size. I’ve successfully played up to eight videos at once.

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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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Lab Notes: Pixillion Image Converter

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By Nelson Garcia and Alex Roberts

Pixillion Image Converter by NCH Software is a low-cost versatile tool designed to convert, compress, and edit images across a wide range of formats. A tool like this can be particularly useful if you receive image formats within discovery that won’t open on your computer, or if you need to convert images to a particular format to send to someone else.

For example, iPhones will commonly store pictures in an HEIC format and Windows computers do not have any built-in programs that can open these files. Pixillion can open and convert these files into other formats (like the commonly used JPG format).

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