Cracking codes is day-to-day business in one campus building

President of forensics company that operates out of ASU building says work is like what can be seen on CSI

 by Stephen Csonka
 published on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

In the Downtown campus's 411 building, there is a glassed-in hallway only accessible by security card or an inside employee.

This area, labeled "Suite 170," is home of Forensics Consulting Solutions, LLC, or FCS.

When two large companies sue each other, FCS, which is not affiliated with ASU, is hired by the company's lawyers to sort through information on corporate computers. FCS employee Joan O'Meara said her company is a money saver for many of its clients.

"If this were printed out, it could cost the client a lot of money as a team of lawyers would have to read through all the printed material stored in every computer involved in the case, each lawyer costing up to $400 an hour," she said. "We use concept search software on the original data to find the relevant data. It both saves time and trees."

Kelly "KJ" Kuchta, the president of FCS said one of the company's first major cases was Medtronics v. Michaelson.

"[FCS is] a lot like CSI," Kuchta said. "[It's] based on the same principle but what we do is become expert gatherers, preservers, collectors and identifiers of electronic data that the court would use."

In Medtronics v. Michaelson, Kuchta said Michaelson had developed over 1,000 patents and eventually sold them to a company that was later sold to Medtronics, one of the world's most prominent medical device companies.

An employee at Medtronics told Michaelson his patents were not being used and would soon become non-viable. Michaelson, a surgeon, knew this was not true, so he filed a suit against Medtronics, and Medtronics counter-sued.

Kuchta said a major factor in this case was time. If all of Medtronics' electronic data were to be printed out, it would take years for a team of lawyers to go through them and find the relevant data.

Each day was costing Michaelson millions, so FCS used a type of software algorithm, called Latent-Semantic Analysis, to identify all of the electronic documents that mentioned those patents and put them together into one document. This process took three months.

"The courts ruled in favor of the doctor, and Medtronics settled to pay an original $800 million plus $500 to $600 million more on the patents they already used," Kuchta said. He added that this was an approximate $1.3 billion settlement and a huge victory for both the doctor and the company who made the information search so cost-effective, FCS.

Besides this particular specialty, FCS can identify and recover hidden information, and bypass or crack password protection, among other things.

Michael Cullen, a computer engineering junior, said he would love to one day work for FCS.

"I heard that they hire some of the brightest minds from ASU and other local universities occasionally, and I would be honored to work for them," he said.

Reach the reporter at: stephen.csonka@asu.edu.