You can’t get much “newbier” than I, but my question is not as much technical as it is about the current economic state and its effect on this field of computer forensics. In short, how has the recession affected business?
I’m a retired law enforcement officer who wanted back in the profession via computer forensics. My 20+ years of LE plus a MS in computer technology waived enough hours from a certificate program in Computer and Digital Forensics at a nearby college for me to handle the studies in a year. Originally, my chances of working with the local police department’s ICTF/ICAC unit looked promising but I’m now told that the federal funds that fuel it are not only late they are not going to be what they used to be. In fact, not only is there no money for additional personnel, cuts will have to be made in other areas as well. Corporate avenues are pretty much blocked, as most of you know, with that “3 to 5 years experience” barrier, so, that’s mostly a dead-in for me, particularly in this primarily agricultural state in which I live.
I’m not whining. There are lots of people these days who need jobs; I simply want one, and that’s a big difference. I truly am interested to know how the recession is affecting you professionals in both LE and corporate. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Seeker
Vermont
Seeker,
If you want a place to start look into the Litigation Support and Electronic Discovery companies. They do computer forensics that is generally not criminal and wont always require the experience.
Good Luck
Just as an aside to those interested in the effect of the recession on job choices, there's a short article by David Sullivan titled "Should Computer Forensics Professionals Consider Changing Jobs in a Recession?" available here.
Jamie
Well as someone who was laid off in September of last year, and just started a new job doing CF last week. I can say it's not hurting the company I'm working for. )
Tom
I know of one LE department that laid off folks who were working street details, and then filled their open spots with investigators from the computer crime lab. It seems like anyone can be impacted by this economy.
Greetings,
My opinion is that the e-discovery world is about to go through some seriously difficult times. Clients are having a very hard time swallowing $1,000 per gig for processing costs, along with a host of other fees. Some e-discovery firms are aggressively cutting prices, probably below what is sustainable. Some clients are bringing e-discovery in house, and a lot of vendors are selling into this area, including Guidance.
Further, e-discovery and forensics are very different. They share a common foundation in the collections/imaging stage, but are proceed along very different lines after that. My experience suggests that many e-discovery firms claim to do forensics but they'd really prefer that the work be done on the e-discovery side of the house.
-David
The 'Credit Crunch Crime Wave' means that we're overloaded with work at the moment. We have hired three people in the last two weeks to try and keep up with demand.
Bare in mind that we are a contractor for the Police and I know of a couple of companies that have recently disappeared that mostly dealt with private/defence work.
I would love to contract with Law Enforcement. Just in my area, they refuse to use non-sworn people.
However, I can say that criminal defense work is keeping me plenty busy.
Further, e-discovery and forensics are very different.
I couldn't agree more but I'd have to say that I am starting to see a backlash from automated eDiscovery, namely, that the results are too non-specific and require too much manual post-processing.
I was involved in a case where the plaintiff subpoenaed all documents related to a specific production process from a major manufacturer as part of a trade secrets action. The company responded by producing 10 million pages of documents two weeks before the close of discovery (I won't say what tool was used).
Some might argue that the fault was in the search heuristics, but the problem is that the search really needed to be started by a person who knew the facts of the case, the arguments being made, and the law. From there, he or she could have much more easily separated the signal from the noise and structured the search, accordingly.
Greetings,
And the e-discovery firms are making a lot of money off of the manual post-processing. The people doing this work are often relatively junior, often hourly employees. There is a big gap between the billed cost per hour and the cost per hour for the person doing the work. There's a bit of a sweatshop mentality and the financial crisis isn't going to help as people are happy to have *any* job, even if the conditions aren't very good.
It is not in the e-discovery firms' interest to reduce the number of documents processed too much since they're getting paid by the volume of data processed. If they're too good on the front end, there's a lot less revenue on the back end. If they can offer litigation consulting services in conjunction with e-discovery services, then they can try to help the client save on e-discovery costs by working smarter earlier in the process.
Following that thought, there is clearly a market for encouraging clients to buy your litigation consulting services before there is any lawsuit at all.
Of course, noone in the legal industry seems to want to spend money until it is absolutely necessary, so we're back to processing 10 million pages of documents two weeks before trial at $1,000/GB.
-David