Once a lawsuit over trade secrets or a noncompete begins,
"discovery" is usually the next step in the
case. This is the phase of a lawsuit where each
party asks for documents and conducts depositions to obtain
relevant information from the other side. As any
employment litigator can tell you, discovery usually involves
tricky issues regarding what information is relevant to the
lawsuit (and thus should be disclosed) and what is the personal
information of an employee or other person that has little to do
with the case.
To help employers, employees, and lawyers understand this
problem as it affects personal devices (e.g., iPhones, home
computers, etc.), David Garrett and Ronald J. Hedges have written an excellent article on
the examination of these devices in discovery. They
write that courts will sometimes permit experts retained by
one party to examine a forensic image of the personal device of
another party to determine what is relevant and should be
