When the lab never sleeps

Authored by Chad Gish

Originally published in the October 2025 issue of Magnet Unlocked. Want to be the first to see new content? Sign up for our monthly newsletter, Magnet Unlocked.

A few years ago, my lab at Nashville Police Department hit the breaking point.

Our backlog was growing, detectives were waiting months for devices to come back, and I caught myself thinking the same thing many investigators do: We’ll just overtime our way out of this.

But you can’t outwork exponential data growth.

As the cases piled up, so did the pressure. In homicide or violent-crime work, time isn’t a luxury; it’s the difference between a solved case and a family that never gets answers. When you’re the lead detective, that weight sits squarely on your shoulders.

That’s when we started moving towards what I call modern forensics. We introduced automation into our lab, with tools like Magnet Automate, Magnet Graykey Fastrak, Magnet Review letting the machines handle the work we used to babysit.

I’ll admit, I was skeptical. For someone raised on the idea that a human should touch every step of the process, automation felt like handing the wheel to someone else. But what I discovered is that automation doesn’t replace the examiner, it frees them.

A slow and methodical process

I’ve been in digital forensics long enough to remember when “automation” meant staying in the lab until midnight to press the next button yourself. Back in 2005, when I started building the Nashville PD’s first digital forensics lab, we were working with tools like Norton DiskEdit and Project-a-Phone; literally photographing phone screens one by one. We thought that was cutting-edge.

In those early years, forensics was manual, methodical, and painfully slow. You didn’t dare leave a process unattended because one missed prompt could mean another night in the lab. It was push-button forensics in every sense.

I can still remember Friday evenings when I’d walk the line of machines, watching progress bars crawl. It rarely did before midnight. That’s the personal balance we all fight, the one between duty and life outside the lab.

Using Automate to get rid of a daunting backlog

In Nashville, there are five Automate nodes running, each one named after a country legend—Dolly, Reba, Hank, Willie, and Waylon. They hum along day and night, processing evidence while everyone’s home, sleeping, or working other cases.

The first weekend we ran Automate, we processed 82 devices—phones, flash media, computers—without a single error. Three days later, the backlog that had haunted us for months was gone.

That’s the methodological balance, trusting automation to handle the repeatable so we can focus on the irreplaceable: interpreting, correlating, and telling the story behind the evidence.

The future of forensics isn’t just faster. It’s smarter, more accessible, and infinitely more collaborative. With Magnet Review, a homicide detective and a prosecutor can start analyzing digital evidence in the cloud the same day it’s processed. That kind of immediacy changes everything.

Maintaining a balance between automation and insight

Still, the fine balance remains. For every advancement in speed, we have to maintain rigor. For every layer of automation, we need a layer of human insight. Forensics isn’t just about extracting data; it’s about understanding the context, the artifacts, the digital breadcrumbs that tell the truth when people can’t or won’t.

Looking back, I realize that digital forensics has always been about balance—the balance between technology and instinct, precision and compassion, automation and accountability. Whether it’s a homicide case or a child-exploitation investigation, the goal is the same, find the truth, and do it fast enough to make a difference.

We’ve come a long way from photographing phone screens. But even now, in a cloud-connected world where evidence moves faster than ever, the heart of forensics hasn’t changed. It’s still the examiner—tired, determined, and walking that fine line between machine and meaning.