WELCOME to my personal website. It has been some time in the making, but at last it is here. If you already know me and how I work and live then you will then know that you are welcome here; welcome to browse, read and connect with me. The site is intended to be the best place to contact me and seek my views. You can also follow me on Twitter (see my Tweets, although since Twitter was renamed "X" I rarely Tweet). So this site is alikelman.com and I am best known as Ali Kelman
What do I do?
Today this site records the work I did as a barrister in private practice from 1979 until 2000, as an independent Forensic Computing expert witness in the years thereafter and as a consultant in all aspect of computers and law. I am also an engineer and an inventor - I have five granted UK patents and two granted US patents to my name. On this site there is information on how I helped people sort out any problem they had with the reliability of computer evidence. Today you may be having unreliable computer evidence cited against you in the courtroom. Or you may be wishing to bring proceedings and want to know how to prepare your digital evidence for use in the courtroom . My first book, written with Richard Sizer of the British Computer Society, was called "The Computer in Court" and you can get it free today on this site - see the cover above. (For the Google Docs edition click here and you can also download it in a variety of formats including EPUB, Word, ODT or PDF) At the time, Richard Sizer CEng FIEE FBCS CITP worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough. Together we formulated some of the background to what was to become the ethics and best practice of the computer industry in the new century - a topic on which Richard independently wrote and spoke about during the 1990s. In September 2023 the Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review published a peer reviewed article which considered some of the deeper issues surrounding our work. You can find my current thoughts about computer evidence and preserving justice (with links) in my page How to solve the Computer Evidence problem.
A few years ago I moved outside of the legal arena to develop a business in the field of protecting the television watershed and additionally protecting children from inappropriate content and pornography on television and the internet. This business is called SafeCast and it is only relevant, in respect of this site, in my pages on the Digital Economy Act 2017. However, if the protection of children is a matter that concerns you I would ask you to visit our initiative SafeCast Global,
The rest of this site is a record and a resource on computers and the law for students, such as those I taught at the London School of Economics, and for anyone else who is interested in the topic.
For an example of the kind of things that I used to do take a look at this judgement of the High Court in Antigua. I was instructed by Martin Kenney and Company to be their independent expert in the action against the UK firm Vantis the UK's 12th largest accountancy firm, who had been appointed as liquidators in the collapse of the Stanford Investment Bank (SIB) . My evidence, as referred to in the judgment, was preferred by the court and, as a consequence, Vantis were dismissed as liquidators. As a direct consequence Vantis lost a $100 Million liquidation contract went into administration and new liquidators were appointed. As a result of appointing new liquidators, in January 2021 following years of concerted work on SIB by Martin Kenney and Company , a three month trial of their $4 bn (+) negligence/recklessness action against TD Bank in Toronto began. The case is a seminal one in pursuing banks to hold them to account for facilitating fraud. See SIB for the daily viewing links to the trial and here for a CBC news report on the start of the Canadian litigation. in 2021. In April 2021 the Huston Chronicle reported that the "Stanford fraud receiver recovery approaches $1 billion". The Toronto litigation could add another $4 bn to this successful outcome. - The Canadian High Court's decision at first instance is going to be appealed to the UK Supreme Court if the Supreme Court grants leave to appeal.
For the potential consequences in global litigation feel free to email me to start up a discussion.
After I left private practice and became engaged in various consultancy roles, I worked closely with solicitors and barristers - but always been independent of them. There are very interesting funding propositions arising around the world in civil actions arising out of complex frauds - see, for example, this Wired article about the work done by Martin Kenney and Company There are new ways of funding litigation using third party litigation funders who are able to take up to fifty percent of the damages awarded in UK Supreme Court approved litigation funding agreements.
If you are wanting to bring a civil case, or defend a criminal case, then I have good working relationships with highly experienced and trusted forensic experts who know how to image computing (and mobile phone) data, prepare reports and give truthful and reliable testimony in all courts.
In 2016 I was one of a small minority of technology start-ups which supported the UK leaving the European Union under the Referendum. I spoke in debates and gave a short speech at the Excel Centre for Business for Britain on Why TechCity and employment would be better post Brexit. The speech remains my view on the opportunities to be presented to global Britain which we should advance. You can read it here. More recently I wrote a piece for GlobalVisionUK (website no longer available) on the prospects of a UK-US Digital Free Trade Agreement by the end of 2020. You can read that article as it was submitted to GlobalVisionUK here
In 2017 I started putting up some pages on the Digital Economy Bill 2016/17 (as it then was) during its passage through Parliament.
Finally I have written about bringing enforcement proceedings for infringement of patents in the UK and in the USA - you care read my views on that here.