This is part of the back-to-back posts on China adventures!
The weekend before I represented my company at a forensics conference in Wuhan, China. Wuhan is a huge city about two hours away from Shanghai by plane, so I flew out from the airport closer to the city in Shanghai (Hongqiao).
Air travel in China has gotten a lot better since the days of “rude inflight behavior” that was quickly quashed by the government.
The ride to the hotel from the Wuhan airport was very long, and featured row after row of tall, dark apartment buildings. It felt a little bit dystopian, Ghost in the Shell-like.
The Hetian hotel itself was nice – Hetian means field of lotuses – and the accommodations were pleasant. They did have creepy pandas at the entrance and rip-off Peppa Pig statues though. Why are there always creepy animal statues everywhere in China? Is it just creepy because they are putting cutesy things in non-family spots?
Anyway, allow me to introduce a little about part of what I’m doing in China. Over the course of civil litigation in the United States, there is a Discovery phase where the litigants have to surrender (almost) all of their records related to the case. The scope of discovery is determined by a judge or simply by management if they are doing an internal investigation.
So our job is to go and collect as instructed by lawyers all the documents and data related to the scope of discovery, including emails, Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents, mobile data like text and instant messages, other specialty data types, sometimes social media, scanned and paper documents, everything. Obviously this can get to be a lot of data.
Then we process and load that data into a database where lawyers and (our) investigators can review the documents in a page-by-page format.
In my next post, I’ll go over some details of the conference.
More later…