Although I work regularly as a consulting expert on civil and criminal legal matters, as I was preparing for my presentation at the IAI conference, I was just reminded of my days providing consulting services for corporate clients.

My first experience was back in the early to mid-1990s. Kodak introduced the DCS-200 digital camera. If I recall correctly, it was a 1.4 megapixel camera that had a 40 megabyte spinning hard drive. Downloading photos required a SCSI connection. I was at the Newport Beach Police Department, and we purchased one of the first ones manufactured. After explaining to my Kodak rep what we were accomplishing with it, Kodak started retaining me to teach their field reps about forensic uses for such a camera. This grew over several years and Kodak became a great client, and at one point they developed a strong market share in the forensic community.

I did some similar work with Polaroid for a short time, but they didn’t pursue a strong digital product line which was unfortunate for them.

Around that time Adobe flew me to San Jose to meet with their Photoshop team. I was never hired to consult for them, but they did bring me on as a beta tester and several features that I requested eventually made it into their product. That wasn’t really a consulting gig, but it was a ton of fun, and it was exciting to help a major software company be aware of the needs of the forensic community.

In the early stages of its development I consulted with Ocean Systems on their ClearID product. This was an excellent Photoshop Plug-in that brought a set of forensic based tools into Photoshop that could be used as filters, including an FFT based pattern removal filter and a true deconvolution (de-blur) filter. My role was providing them with the concepts of what to include and what my workflow with Photoshop was.

In subsequent years I have also had some experiences with a handful of other hardware and software manufacturers – all related to forensic-based products or commercial products with components that were beneficial to the forensic community.

Over the past several years I focused on the casework and the training aspects of my business, almost forgetting about those great experiences. In preparing for my talk on “Going Private” for the IAI Conference this year in Reno, NV, I was fondly reminded of those experiences.

For the forensic expert who is moving from government practice to a private practice – the role of consulting with manufacturers is an area to consider pursuing. My experiences in that area are all good – whether products were developed or not. At a minimum, the consultant helps a corporation determine if they can develop a product that has value for the forensic community and for the corporation. If so, you help to make that product take shape and reach the end users.