Concept · evidence handling
One matter, one channel — a design for where the evidence should live.
Most matters go wrong at the filing stage, quietly, before anyone has analysed anything. Evidence arrives by email to three people, by post to a fourth, on a USB stick from a subsidiary, and in a cloud folder someone set up in a hurry. Versions multiply. Nobody can later say with confidence what arrived when, from whom, or which copy was worked on. That uncertainty is cheap at the start and very expensive in front of a tribunal.
This piece describes the design we use instead. It is not a product or a platform login — it is how a matter is set up, deliberately, in the first week.
The design, in five rules
| Rule | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| One matter reference | Every matter gets a single reference at engagement. Everything that arrives is tied to it. |
| One channel | A single secure route for material — agreed at the start, sized to the matter's sensitivity, Swiss-hosted. Contributors in different branches or countries all feed the same place. |
| Every arrival logged | Who sent what, when, and by what route — recorded on arrival, kept as part of the record. |
| One working copy | Analysis happens on one organised set, not on whichever attachment someone forwarded. The original as-received material stays intact. |
| Return or delete on completion | When the work is done, source material goes back or is destroyed on an agreed timeline. Only the work product is retained. That is stated in our Terms. |
Why it is designed this way
Chain of custody. If a matter ends up before a court, a regulator, or an opposing expert, the questions are always the same: where did this document come from, when, and has it changed? A single logged channel answers them from the record rather than from memory.
Data protection. Under the GDPR and the Swiss FADP, holding personal data you no longer need is a liability, not an asset. The return-or-delete rule keeps the practice's holding of your material to the life of the engagement — and means the answer to "where is my data?" is always short.
Contributors who aren't specialists. The person sending records from a branch office should not need training. One link, one place, a confirmationOne block built on top of the block containing a transaction. More confirmations, more settled. — the structure lives on our side, not theirs.
What this is — and is not
The channel is arranged per matter, using established Swiss infrastructure, and set up with you around the matter in front of you. There is no self-serve portal to log into today, and this page is not a claim that there is. The design matters more than the tooling: the five rules hold whether the material is three folders or three terabytes.
So what — if you take one thing from this page: agree where the evidence will live before it starts arriving. It is a one-hour decision at the start of a matter, and unrecoverable six months in.
Concept piece — how matters are set up in this practice. Terms, including return-or-delete, at probative.io/terms.