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, and we were waiting weeks 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.

We were effectively babysitting every step of every case, and the pressure to deliver was relentless.

In the enterprise world, that pressure isn’t about violent crime—it’s about protecting sensitive data, ensuring regulatory compliance, and responding to incidents before they escalate into full-blown crises. The stakes might look different, but the stress feels familiar.

That’s when we started moving towards what I call modern forensics. We introduced automation—Magnet Automate and Magnet Review—tools that let 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.

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, incident responders, legal teams, and security analysts can collaborate in near real-time, reviewing evidence as it’s processed. That immediacy changes how decisions are made, how risks are mitigated, and how business continuity is preserved.

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 an insider threat investigation, a ransomware response, or a regulatory audit, the goal is the same: deliver answers fast, accurately, and in a way that drives meaningful action.

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— focused, meticulous, and walking the line between machine and meaning.