The evolving standard for digital evidence in court. The opening sets the theme for the three days: as more of the record lives on devices and in the cloud, the question is no longer whether digital evidence is allowed, but what an examiner must do for it to be trusted.
Sound seizure and imaging practice that survives challenge. Working through phones, drives, and live systems, the session covers when to pull power and when not to, how to verify an image with hashing, and how to record each step so the method can be repeated by an opposing expert.
When the data does not sit on the seized device at all. We look at preserving account and message history, the limits of what a snapshot captures, and the documentation needed to show that remote material was collected intact and unaltered.
Documenting integrity from scene to courtroom. The practical core of digital work: labelling, transfer logs, hash verification, and the contemporaneous notes that let an examiner prove, long afterward, that nothing changed in their care.
What courts accept, and what gets excluded. Examiners and counsel compare how different forums treat the same evidence, where rules diverge, and how a careful examiner future-proofs a report against the strictest standard likely to apply.
Tool-mark and cartridge-case identification fundamentals. A hands-on look at how examiners align striae and impressed marks under the comparison microscope, what counts as sufficient agreement, and how observations are recorded for review by a second examiner.
Communicating uncertainty in ballistics findings. The session confronts the modern critique of pattern comparison head-on: how studies of method performance are read, why a result is stated as a probability of agreement rather than a certainty, and how to phrase that honestly for a jury.
Reading the scene rather than the bench. Using patterning and physical reconstruction to estimate firing distance and direction, the session stresses what these methods can and cannot establish, and how assumptions in a reconstruction must be disclosed.
Working a ballistics matter from bench to brief. Participants take a worked example from initial examination through report and anticipated challenge, deciding together where the evidence is strong and where an honest expert concedes its limits.
Clarity, scope, and the opinions an expert can defend. The session breaks down the anatomy of a usable report — stated assumptions, method, results, and a conclusion that never reaches past the analysis behind it — and the habits that keep it readable to a non-specialist.
Holding up under pressure without overstating findings. A live exercise in which experts field pointed questioning, learn to answer the question actually asked, and practise the discipline of saying clearly when something falls outside their field.
Translating technical findings for people hearing them for the first time. We work on analogies that clarify without distorting, on visual aids that help rather than mislead, and on the line between explaining evidence and arguing a case.
Forensics and the law: where the gaps remain. Speakers from all three tracks gather to take stock — what still divides the laboratory from the courtroom, and what each side could do to close the distance before the next dispute.