What Is Chain Of Custody?

Chain of custody, in a legal context, can refer to both physical and electronic evidence. With the huge increase in the leverage of the latter within litigation cases, today, chain of custody is a key requirement of any eDiscovery process.

Electronic communication has come a long way in a few short decades. In 2006, Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure was amended to confirm that discovery of electronically stored information stood on equal footing with discovery of paper documents.

Unlike some other eDiscovery processes, a legal hold reaches far beyond your legal department and can potentially impact personnel across your whole business.

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) was developed to improve standards and set guidelines in the eDiscovery process. Created by George Socha and Tom Gelbmann, the  EDRM illustrates the sequence of eDiscovery activities relating to a specific legal matter.

The events of 2020 highlighted two major challenges that modern in-house legal teams face. First, there has been an explosion of data sources across most organizations. From team collaboration platforms (Slack, MS Teams, etc.) and video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex), to mobile text messages, company websites, and social media accounts, companies are faced with new kinds of ESI being generated in real-time throughout their organizations. 

Optical character recognition (OCR) offers organizations the opportunity to get a much better digital handle on the information they store.

In a previous article, we discussed the importance of protecting your website content from intellectual property (IP) theft. By keeping a complete archive of your website—including all edits and deletions—it becomes much easier to prove that original content from your site has been stolen by another party.

Social media might seem like a lawless environment where cruel comments and reckless libel are simply the order of the day—but there have been instances where courts have classified social media posts and comments as defamation. This is true both in a country like the UK, where defamation is generally easier to prove, and the US, where the legal threshold is much higher.

Slack is an increasingly essential element of many enterprises’ technology stack. When it comes to internal communication and collaboration, its functionality is truly exceptional. But with great power comes great responsibility...

Almost every day after a European football match, there’s another media headline highlighting a player who received racial abuse on social media. Football clubs condemn it. The content gets reported to social media platforms. Accounts are deleted. Authorities are notified and declare a ‘zero tolerance’ policy against discrimination and prejudiced behavior. Many players share the posts, highlighting the racism they continually face.