A nice reference has turned up on CY4OR’s website to supplement the words like “professionalism”, “expertise” and “excellent” which recur amongst their testimonials. The one I like reads as follows:

Professional and prompt service and able to “dumb down” the technicalities so that they are understandable to computer illiterates like myself

Another reference includes the words “a personal element”, which ties in with my strongly-held view that personal connections are a key differentiator in a market where it is hard for any of them to find new words to describe what they do.

This is not in fact what took me to the CY4OR website. I went there to capture a couple of blog posts which Bethan Williams put up at the beginning of June and which, like all blog posts, have disappeared from the top of the list. They are summaries, in terms intended to be understood by laymen, of the main purposes and benefits of engaging a forensic investigations company like CY4OR.

One is headed Computer Aided Fraud Detection and Investigation Tools and the other is called Recent Developments in Computer Forensics Analysis. Being “computer illiterate”, as the referee describes him or herself, is not itself the problem. The problem lies in not spotting the possibility of finding (or losing) evidence at the right time in a case, and knowing where to turn for help with that. These articles recur in the current edition of CY4OR’s newsletter – this is called Digital Exposure, and you can sign up for it on the CY4OR site.

I am writing a paper for CY4OR which focuses on what lawyers need to know in a broad range of circumstances, including some which are not necessarily obvious. Amongst the testimonials, for example, are a couple which refer to the use of forensic evidence to disprove something or to acquit someone wrongly accused of some computer misuse. It is worth emphasising that computers can hold many clues which may overturn apparently strong but circumstantial evidence, as well as for finding or proving a case.

CY4OR are certified Clearwell partners and the latest entry on the CY4OR blog, headed A More Comprehensive eDisclosure Solution, covers the acquisition of Clearwell by Symantec which has just closed – I wrote about that here. CY4OR will be very pleased to show you what it is which prompted Symantec to buy Clearwell for $410 million.

A pedant writes: “What is a lay lawyer?” Mike Taylor challenges my use of the word “lay” in my heading. He is not wrong to tease on the subject, but I ain’t changing the thing which connects this post to Google’s indexes. “Lay” in this context means “not expert”; lawyers may be expert in the law but, like the giver of the testimonial referred to, not expert by their own admission in some discipline needed to pursue an aspect of engaging in their profession. That is what the article is largely about, and that is why the word “lay” appears in its title.

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