That is tough to narrow down and there is a lot of chance involved.So how recently are we talking here...? Can I get a time frame?
If it was fairly recently then there is a good chance that the person who dropped the liquid on it didn't try using it for long after the accident. The quicker you can get to it the quicker you can clean up the mess and stop it from further damaging the rest of the unit.
If you are dealing with laptops there is a chance you can recover spare parts such as the HDD/SSD, ram, socketed cpu, Bluetooth/WiFi module etc


