Announcing a CLE Course on Source Code in Litigation with Our Colleague Andrew Schulman

Join DisputeSoft Managing Director Andrew Schulman for a live webcast on April 29, 2020 to learn about the important role that software source code plays in intellectual property cases such as patent, copyright, and trade secret disputes, as well as contracts, products liability, and even criminal litigation.

The CLE Course, titled “Computer Software Source Code in Litigation” awards attorneys 1.5 General CLE Credits and is available on-demand or via a live webcast at 1:00-2:45pm PT / 4:00-5:45pm ET.

Source code is a human-readable form of computer software. It forms the basis for the apps and internet platforms we use every day, and for the ever-increasing computerization of devices and processes. Source code can play an important evidentiary role in a wide variety of litigation. Not only is it central to litigation directly related to software, such as patent, copyright, and trade secret cases, but it often also figures in other practice areas, including contracts, products liability, and even criminal law (for example, a DUI defendant’s expert might examine breathalyzer source code to see if there are “bugs” that might be used to cast reasonable doubt on the breathalyzer’s output). How a particular device operates may become a question in cases that are otherwise unrelated to software, and this is often best answered by inspecting the source code for the device (e.g., medical equipment, voting machines).

1. How source code is handled in the discovery phase of litigation
2. How experts use source code to answer specific types of litigation-related questions
3. How “source code” is defined, and types of source code, both generally and in the context of a particular case
4. Source code protective orders (POs), including their impact on the source-code examination
5. The relation of source code to other types of electronic information (ESI), and how source code can be correlated with other evidence such as emails
6. The relation of a litigation source-code examination to the use of source code in non-litigation contexts, to highlight Daubert issues of the basis and methodology for expert opinions regarding software
7. Tools and methods typically used to inventory, search, compare, and analyze source code
8. The differences between source code examination and computer forensics
9. Analyzing software (including source code) to question the results generated by forensics devices and forensics software
10. Analyzing software (including source code) to uncover an organization’s de facto policies and practices
11. Source code “gotchas” that can be used to question an expert’s testimony
12. Searching for absences, negatives, counter-examples, and for code missing from a party’s source code production