Troy Payne is an attorney with over 13 years of experience as a federal law clerk, a law firm associate, and managing director of a digital forensics and analytics consultancy. His experience includes work in state, federal and international courtrooms, assisting judges and senior counsel with the conduct of dozens of trials. His field of expertise is the intersection of law and digital data, including such tasks as developing and coordinating voluminous eDiscovery plans, managing nuanced data collection and analysis, and addressing myriad cybersecurity issues. Troy has been engaged by major law firms and corporate counsel to lead and manage complex forensic and cybersecurity projects for their clients, including banks, unions, social media and internet platforms, software companies, and industrial clients. He has a passion for translating emerging digital languages into the languages of law and business.
Troy’s insight into the increasingly complex digital issues that attorneys encounter is a valuable resource, especially when litigation is anticipated or has just begun. He can assist attorneys in offensive or defensive discovery postures, in data-centric litigation or internal investigations, and his services are available to both law firms and their most valued clients. He can be a testifying expert in appropriate cases or locate the specific expertise that the case demands, and he provides extensive confidential consulting services, of which the following are representative examples:
- Strategic Digital Consultation: Troy provides privileged and confidential consultation on a wide range of digital issues, such as assessing the extent of a client’s systems and data repositories, designing the forensic acquisition of complex datasets, and cybersecurity prevention and response. As such, he is the first call you should make in the critical early stages of a matter when vetting the scope, pitfalls, and potential advantages associated with collecting and analyzing a client’s data.
- Cyber Vendor Selection and Coordination: The increasing specialization of cyber vendors makes it more difficult than ever to know where to turn for answers. It also makes managing a vendor’s tasks and vetting the quality of its services more challenging. Troy has years of experience marshaling and managing numerous vendors on very large projects, while maintaining an understanding of counsel’s needs and goals. He can help select the right vendors, build the right team, get the desired results, and make the results useful in courtrooms and beyond.
- eDiscovery Consultation and Management: eDiscovery costs and data volumes have grown exponentially, making the process much more difficult to design, manage and control. Troy has extensive experience in designing electronically stored information (ESI) retrieval campaigns and has led large discovery review teams for major law firms. Critically, Troy understands the advantages of cutting-edge technology, which has enabled him to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to interrogate voluminous data sets using small tactical review teams, thus improving the speed of review and substantially reducing costs.
- Forensic and Cyber Investigation: Often, law firms need answers that are buried in a client’s data located in the cloud, on servers, and on proliferating mobile devices. The average corporate digital environment is growing more complicated, with data from enterprise-level platforms (like Slack or Dropbox ) and associated network-level metadata proving to be the most probative. Troy can help attorneys plan and coordinate investigations of data from multiple digital platforms that may provide evidence of employee intellectual property (IP) theft, information technology (IT) mismanagement, internal or external breaches, and other forms of corporate malfeasance.
Troy’s skill set is unique among Vident’s experts. If you are working on a matter that could benefit from his expertise, please contact us for a copy of his CV and to schedule a preliminary conversation with him.
