I actually used Intella for many months before I had any training. It's a piece of cake to use effectively. I learned a little in the training, but nothing earth-shattering for me.
Just last week, a few of us (me plus 3 non-computer forensics people) attended the 4 hour webinar Intella offers every month or so. That four hour class was enough to give them a good idea of how to use Intella effectively for searching and tagging. It's $495 plus four hours of their time, so I feel like that's a very good deal. There's another class on April 25. I really think that's enough to get your investigators up to speed on Intella.
Of course, if you find something particularly damning and will go to court with it, you'll probably want to verify everything with EnCase so you can point out things like where on the hard drive the item appears. But, once the investigators find it on their own, it should be pretty easy for you to find it in EnCase (or a similar tool).
I will say this--Intella is a young tool. Each new version has oddities about how it searches. If you use 1.6.3 and do a particular search, you'll get slightly different results than using 1.6.2. This is one of the reasons you'll want to fall back on an EnCase-like tool to verify Intella results for anything you plan to use at trial.
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