Guide library
A standing reference for people who have to account for evidence: what a custody record contains, how electronic material is authenticated, what a hash value settles, and how an item is handled from collection through to presentation. Every page cites its sources, and every checkable claim is read back against them before it publishes.
24 guides published across the four subjects below.
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SHA-256 is substantially more resistant to collision attacks than MD5 and aligns with federal cryptographic standards; MD5 remains legally defensible for copy authentication under FRE 902(14) but exposes evidence to cross-examination challenge about its known practical weaknesses.
Read the full guide →Each guide answers a single question of the kind that gets typed into a search box at the moment it matters — who signs a transfer, what an unexplained interval in the record costs, whether a screenshot stands on its own, what a re-computed digest actually settles. The subjects were chosen because they recur in evidence work rather than because they were topical the week they were written, so a page from June is worth the same in December. When one falls behind, it is rewritten in place and keeps its URL instead of being replaced by a newer post at a new address.
Guides are drafted with AI assistance against a fixed brief, then read back against their sources by a separate review pass. A statement that can be checked — a rule number, a holding, a date, an attribution, a figure — either carries a citation to an approved source or it does not publish. The approved list is courts and court records, government and law-enforcement agencies, standards bodies, and open-access scholarship. Vendor marketing and SEO blogs are not acceptable sources for anything a reader might rely on, ours included. Sources are listed in full at the foot of every guide, so the reasoning can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The guides carry general information about evidence-handling practice, not legal advice, and none of them predicts what a court will do — that is decided by a judge on the record in front of them, case by case. Nor will a guide describe this product as having been assessed against a published standard by anybody: the design is informed by FRE 901 and NIST SP 800-86, which names what we read and claims nothing further. Our own records are tamper-evident — alteration is detectable, not prevented — and the guides are held to exactly that wording.
The full editorial standards — sourcing, verification, and corrections →
Everything here sits under one of four headings. Each has a hub page that covers the subject at length and lists what is still to come; the titles beneath link straight to the guide.
Records, forms, signatures, and gaps — the paperwork saying where an item has been since somebody picked it up, and the failures that surface when the file is read closely years later.
What has to be shown before a judge will look at a message, a screenshot, a photograph, or a page capture — and the routes that let a written certification do the work of a live witness.
Why a short string of hexadecimal is worth anything: which algorithm, what a re-computed match settles, when the original value was taken, and how linking entries makes a later edit visible.
Procedure — the stages an item passes through, what each stage is expected to leave behind in writing, and where two organisations' records of the same handoff are most likely to disagree.
The same custody record does a different job depending on who is holding it. Each page covers the workflow, the vocabulary, and the templates that fit that practice.
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