Vigo County High Tech CyberCrime Unit speeds case closure times with secure evidence sharing

Every case that passed through the Vigo County High Tech CyberCrime Unit (HTCU) came with a logistical challenge attached: how to get critical evidence into the hands of detectives and prosecutors without losing a week to SSD flash drive pickups and drop-offs.

As head of the HTCU, Jason James supports more than 40 law enforcement agencies across Indiana with digital forensics, handling everything from homicide and drug investigations to CSAM cases. The agencies he serves face real technical constraints: limited storage, restrictive firewalls, and underpowered hardware that made opening and navigating large evidence files a struggle.

James and his team had been distributing digital evidence on SSD flash drives, which involved copying files, tracking drives, and coordinating returns. Investigators and prosecutors would copy what they needed and send the drives back, while James maintained the chain. It added up to a week to case closure times for every case that went through the process.

Historical cases compounded the problem. When a detective called about an investigation from months earlier, James had to go back into the archives, locate the right files, and physically transfer everything again, slowing the very work his unit was built to accelerate.

James saw cloud delivery as the way to bypass those bottlenecks entirely, and found the path forward in Magnet Review. With detectives and prosecutors able to open cases instantly in any browser, the solution eliminated the need for large file downloads, local storage concerns, and waiting for physical media.

Part of what made that possible was how naturally Magnet Review fit into existing workflows. The interface looks and feels consistent with tools his team already rely on, including Magnet Axiom and Portable Case, so there was no steep learning curve and nothing to learn from scratch.

Review also centralized case storage. Instead of juggling multiple portable cases and drives, James now keeps everything in a single platform and can retrieve any case in seconds. Detectives can review evidence without installing software, and James can share access before uploads are even complete, allowing collaboration to start immediately.

Since adopting Magnet Review, James has cut roughly five days from case closure times, and the savings extend beyond his own unit to every agency he supports.

The efficiency carries over to historical cases too. When a detective calls about an investigation from months earlier, James can open it in Magnet Review and have everything ready in minutes, with no archive dig, no reissuing drives, and no delay.

Half of the agencies James supports have moved to Magnet Review exclusively. For the rest, the transition is happening case by case. Some agencies are still attached to flash drives and portable cases, “not yet in the cloud mindset” as James puts it, but detectives and prosecutors who have made the switch have told him they value being able to review evidence from anywhere, even collaborating simultaneously from separate offices.

James encourages peers to see cloud adoption as a spectrum rather than an all-or-nothing leap, starting small and applying cloud tools where they can deliver quick, visible wins. Those early successes, he’s found, build the trust needed to bring hesitant agencies along.

The next step for James is Magnet One, offering SaaS-based storage and the ability to share raw data files with agencies and access cases from anywhere. As he puts it, it just makes managing the unit much easier.