Equity Analytics, LLC v. Lundin, 2008 WL 615528 (D.D.C. Mar. 7, 2008).
Plaintiff claimed the defendant, a former employee, illegally accessed electronically stored information after being terminated. The parties agreed a computer forensics examination was necessary to analyze the defendant's computer, but could not agree on how the examination should progress. To protect his privacy, the defendant sought to restrict the search by keywords and file type, but the plaintiff argued this would be inadequate because file type can be altered to appear as something they are not. Recognizing that the effectiveness of a particular search methodology requires expert testimony, Magistrate Judge Facciola required the plaintiff to submit an affidavit from its examiner explaining, inter alia, the limitation of the proposed search, how the search is to be conducted, whether a mirror image would be a perfect copy and whether there would be some reason to preserve the drive once imaged.

Wild v. Alster, 377 F.Supp.2d 186 (D.D.C. 2005).
In a medical malpractice lawsuit, the plaintiff moved for a new trial after the jury found in favor of the defendant. The plaintiff alleged the court erroneously denied a request for an expert examination of the defendant's computer. In particular, the plaintiff sought to discover if certain dates, relating to photographs of her face were taken, could be retrieved from the defendant's hard drive. The original photographs were lost during a computer system conversion; however, the defendant was able to recover some of the photos with the assistance of a data recovery service. The recovered photos only displayed the dates on which the photos were imported into the new system and not the dates on which they were originally taken. Despite this, the plaintiff asserted the defendant's computer consultant testified in a deposition that the original dates were retrievable. In reviewing the deposition testimony, the court determined the expert actually stated it would be impossible to print any of the photographs with dates indicating when they were originally taken. The court denied the motion for a new trial.