Digital forensics encompasses several specialized areas, with firms tailoring their services to the specific needs, goals, and circumstances of their clients. Common branches include: 

1. Computer forensics focuses on data from computers, servers, and storage media. 
2. Network forensics monitors and analyzes network traffic and related activities to investigate unauthorized access, potential breaches, and suspicious activities. 
3. Mobile device forensics examines data from smartphones, tablets, and GPS-enabled devices, and related sources such as SIM cards and app data. 
4. Forensic data analysis looks at structured data to uncover patterns linked to fraud, misconduct, or other irregularities. 
5. Database forensics investigates database content, metadata, logs, transactions, and user activity to identify tampering, misuse, or breach-related evidence. 

Other types of digital forensics include cloud forensics, IoT (Internet of Things) forensics, malware forensics, digital media forensics, and memory forensics. 

The cost of digital forensics services depends on the device type and scope, data volume, urgency, case type (e.g., civil, criminal, internal), and required expertise.   

Agency location is another factor that impacts cost, with certified experts in the United States charging $150-$400+ per hour or $1,500-$8,000 per export.   

Some digital forensics services companies also offer a tiered pricing engagement model, with prices ranging between $5,000 to over $100,000, depending on the complexity of the case. 

Digital forensics is the investigative process of identifying, preserving, recovering, analyzing, and interpreting digital evidence to reconstruct events and determine what happened, how it happened, and who was involved. It is used in cyber incidents, internal investigations, suspected misconduct, and other matters where the integrity and meaning of digital evidence are important. 

E-discovery is the legal process of identifying, preserving, collecting, processing, reviewing, analyzing, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) that is relevant to a dispute, investigation, arbitration, or court matter. 

Here is a side-by-side comparison of each: 

Often, e-discovery processes employ digital forensics expertise, especially when the ESI is in the raw format (metadata or code) or is suspected of having been tampered with.

While the court ultimately decides whether evidence is admissible, a reputable firm strengthens admissibility by following lawful collection procedures, preserving authenticity and integrity, maintaining clear documentation, and using reliable methods that can be explained and defended in court. 

They typically do this through practices, such as: 

• Chain of custody: Documenting who collected, accessed, transferred, stored, and analyzed the evidence, when each step occurred, and what was done to it throughout the investigation. 
• Forensic imaging and integrity verification: Creating a forensic copy when appropriate and using hashing or similar integrity checks to show that the working copy is a true copy of the original and has not been altered. 
• Metadata preservation: Preserving file-system and application metadata, such as timestamps, authorship, and editing history, because that contextual information may be important to the investigation and to later testimony. 
• Validated methods and documentation: Using tested tools, standard procedures, and records detailed enough for another qualified examiner to understand and, where appropriate, reproduce the work. 

You should consider hiring a digital forensics firm when you experience any of these situations: suspected data breaches, employee misconduct investigations, fraud, intellectual property theft, insurance-related investigations, and civil or criminal matters involving digital evidence.   

Digital forensics can also be useful in internal policy investigations, operational incident reviews, and matters where evidence may have been deleted, altered, or concealed.  

You may also need a digital forensics firm when responding to a cyber incident, and want to determine what happened, what systems or data were affected, and how to preserve evidence for legal, regulatory, or recovery purposes.