The 3 Phone Mistakes That Destroy Digital Evidence Before Trial
Copyright 2026, Steve Burgess Smartphones are the single richest source of digital evidence in most litigation today. Text messages, call logs, photos, location history, app data, deleted files — it’s all there, sitting in a device that fits in a shirt pocket. Or in that back pocket that’s covered with bling. You’d think that because phones are so ubiquitous and so central to how people communicate, attorneys and their clients would have developed good instincts about preserving them. You would be wrong, and I say that with forty years of forensic experience and genuine affection for the legal profession. The mistakes I see aren’t necessarily the result of bad intentions. They’re the result of people not knowing what they don’t know — which, in digi tal forensics, turns out to be quite a lot. Here are the three that do the most damage. Mistake One: Letting the Client Keep Using the Phone. This one is so common that I’ve stopped being surprised by it, though I haven’t stopped being pain...