The author and curator of this blog is William Hiltz, the founder of Hiltz & Associates and Hiltz Digital Forensics.

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Paying Attention to Details

This was a case of finding needles in a haystack – literally.

This civil litigation case involved a dental practice transaction dispute in excess of $1.2M.

The Seller had agreed to work in the practice for 8 months after closing.

Once the Seller completed the eight-month work commitment, the Buyer promptly submitted a claim, claiming that the Seller had erased hundreds of patient records during the designated work time-frame, thereby sabotaging the value of the practice.

The Plaintiff produced over 8,000 pages of PDF documents to support its claim for damages; comprised of detailed software audit logs and patient scheduling reports.

The documents identified and showed that the user ID assigned to the Seller had deleted over 800 patient records during the Seller’s 8 month work term. At no time was this fact disputed.

To find the ‘needle in the haystack’, I transformed the Plaintiff’s PDF documents into a database for auditing purposes. (resulting in over 100,000 records)

I compared the date and time stamps for each of the 800+ record deletions against email, appointment, text message and geolocation data to develop a timeline of events that clearly demonstrated the Seller could not have performed the record deletions.

The evidence was compelling and showed that all deletions occurred on dates and times when the Seller was either,

(i) engaged in surgery,
(ii) was not working in the practice or
(iii) was out of town.

The only conclusion was that someone else in the practice had used the Defendant’s user ID to perform the record deletions.

The results of my analysis were presented to the Plaintiff six weeks before trial.  

Two weeks before trial, the Plaintiff withdrew its claim and agreed to compensate the Seller for legal fees and damages.