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Book review: Electronic Evidence

17 March 2011 / Maria Kell
Issue: 7457 / Categories: Blogs
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This ebook brings litigation into the 21st century with a satisfying thud. It takes on board the wisdom of the accepted academic tomes that are relevant to its themes, particularly evidence and disclosure, and styles itself as complementary to those works.

Author: Stephen Mason (with specialist contributors)
Publisher: Butterworths Law; 2nd Revised edition (2010)
ISBN-13: 978-1405749121, Price: £151.00

It sheds light on the technical matters with which most lawyers struggle, from the intricacies of computer software to the law of electronic signatures, and does so with efficiency.

Terminology

The author opens by looking at sources of evidence. In doing so it saves your blushes by looking at the terminology we take for granted but don’t really understand—say, “booting up”, “cloud computing” (see this issue pp 398) or the distinction between “RAM” and “ROM” (nothing to do with sheep or Romulus and Remus). It also spells out the basics, such as the differences between Windows and Unix, ie Mac OS X, as operating systems and the concept of “The Clock” in every computer, which identifies

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