In addition to maintaining an active docket of cases, Mr. McGowan co-manages Stroz Friedberg’s technical operations in the areas of computer forensics, cybercrime response, and electronic discovery. He has provided trial and hearing testimony on a number of occasions and has been admitted as an expert in digital forensics in federal and state court. Mr. McGowan has performed hundreds of forensic examinations and acquisitions of laptop and desktop computers, restorations of email servers and corporate file servers from backup tapes, and other projects involving the preservation and harvesting of relevant digital evidence. Computer forensic analyses performed by Mr. McGowan have resolved disputes about document authenticity and have established the validity of database records. Notably, Mr. McGowan testified for the government as a computer forensics expert in the Enron Barge trial, where he explained how the metadata for a highly incriminating document demonstrated that one of the defendants had received, edited, and saved that document. Mr. McGowan regularly gives classes for Stroz Friedberg’s in-house training program, and has lectured on subjects including the dating of deleted file material; detecting electronic forgeries and backdating; keyword search technology; de-duplicating emails and electronic documents; restoration of backup tapes; and determining whether a hard drive has been wiped, defragmented, or subjected to mass deletions.
Mr. McGowan has also supervised and performed multi-hundred gigabyte electronic discovery assignments for internal and regulatory investigations and civil and criminal litigations, including on-site preservation and searching of electronic data in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He has pioneered methodologies for searching foreign language documents encoded in a proprietary data format, conducted analyses of overwritten backup tapes, and engineered techniques for recovering data from obsolete hardware and storage formats. He has also performed log analyses and other forensic investigations in computer crime cases, including determining whether a computer intrusion compromised the security of consumer credit card numbers and other identifying information. He is an industry-respected authority in the area of electronic discovery and has co-authored two book chapters on electronic discovery strategy and technology.
Mr. McGowan has a B.A. in Economics and Statistics from the University of Chicago, where his studies included researching methods of drawing statistical observations in cases of missing data and making graphical representations of multivariate data. Mr. McGowan is also an EnCase Certified Forensic Examiner.