Solutions

Chain of custody solutions, by industry.

Four ways evidence changes hands. One record that holds. An evidence room, a solo litigator's exhibit binder, a corporate incident response, and a two-person forensics shop are doing the same thing — proving who held an item and that it has not changed since. They go about it differently, and they are asked about it differently. Each page below is written for one of them.

What every chain of custody solution has to do.

The industries differ. The underlying requirement does not. Whatever the item is — a sealed narcotics envelope, a message thread, a forensic image of a laptop — the same four things decide whether the record is worth anything when somebody challenges it.

It records the origin, at the moment of origin.

Where the item came from, who provided it, when, and in what form. A record assembled afterwards from memory and email is the thing a cross-examination is designed to take apart. The distinction that matters is not detail but timing.

Every transfer is signed by both parties.

A custody log that only the custodian signs records an intention, not a handoff. Each change of hands needs the person releasing the item and the person receiving it, with a time neither of them set themselves.

Alteration is detectable, not merely discouraged.

A spreadsheet can be edited and a paper log can be rewritten, and in neither case does the artefact show it. A tamper-evident record is one where a change to an earlier entry is visible in the record itself, because each entry is bound to the one before it.

Someone who does not trust you can check it.

Opposing counsel, a defence expert, a court. If verifying the record requires an account with the vendor, or a declaration from the custodian whose diligence is the point in dispute, it answers the wrong question. Verification on this site is free and needs no account.

A note on the phrase.

“Chain of custody” means two unrelated things. In sustainability and commodity certification it describes how certified material is tracked through a supply chain — mass balance, segregation, and the standards that govern them. That is not this. Everything here is about evidence: physical items and digital files whose handling may have to be accounted for in an investigation, an internal matter, or a courtroom. If you arrived looking for the other sense, this is not the page you want.

Where the four diverge.

What changes between the segments is not the requirement but the shape of the work around it. An evidence room processes a steady volume through a fixed set of people, and its hard problem is throughput and inter-agency handoff. A solo litigator handles a handful of exhibits a year, carries the same evidentiary burden as a hundred-lawyer firm, and has none of the staffing — so per-seat licensing built for a review team is the wrong shape entirely. A corporate legal or incident-response team is usually documenting custody of material that lives in systems it does not control, and needs the record kept outside them. A two-person forensics or investigations shop is often the only witness to its own collection, which makes independent verification the whole argument.

Those differences decide which page below is worth your time — and they are why each one is written separately rather than as a single feature list with four logos on it. Everything on this site is priced per form, with no seats to buy, which is a deliberate consequence of the second of those four cases. There is also a free form generator that needs no account at all, if what you want today is a blank form rather than a system.

Reference material, by subject.

The same questions come up across all four audiences. These hubs collect the published guides on each subject.