Litigation Support

From a legal perspective, just like paper and other electronic documentation, your total web presence is the responsibility of the business as a whole, with liability for content and accuracy being at board level, irrespective of who and how websites are maintained. As the responsible owner of websites, records and information management policies must incorporate systematic archiving of websites with a proper "web archive" in place. If your company then anticipates litigation, your websites will be preserved and retained in a "litigation hold", just like any other ESI.

In Arteria Prop. Pty Ltd. v. Universal Funding V.T.O., Inc., 2008 WL 4513696 (D.N.J. Oct. 1, 2008):

"No Reason to Treat Websites Differently than Other Electronic Files", Court Grants Adverse Inference for Failure to Preserve Website.

Legal liability and regulatory compliance now extend to websites and any other web-based documentation, especially under the newer regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002; U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA, and U.K. Financial Services Authority regulations, as well as the increasing demands of litigation.

The process of litigation, which is reactive in nature, generally requires that electronic information is collected in a manner that is comprehensive, authentic, maintains its content integrity and preserves its form. Increasingly, metadata is required to be collected and maintained during this process and information regarding the chain of custody and authentication is required. While texts and files may be collected and stored in accessible formats, it is quite a different process with websites and content.

Websites are compound, complex, interconnected and hyperlinked collections of documents. While websites can be "printed" to PDF files, the authenticity and admissability of websites in PDFs and printouts is questionable as they can be easily tampered with or faked. Printing websites also fails to capture the hyperlinked nature of the documents within the original site.

Hanzo Enterprise, our pro-active web archiving service, is designed precisely to capture and store website content in their native form. Hanzo can archive any number of websites, with multiple forms of URL, independent of the underlying CMS, database and web technologies. This requires no additional effort by or consent from developers, website designers, marketing agencies or hosting partners. The archive process is managed according to an agreed archive policy, in line with your records and information management needs. The system stores the archive in a secure web archive that requires no change to the original content and can authenticate the archive content as original. The web archive is an independent store for all website content collected over time, from multiple websites. This enables you to retain the websites according to your information management policies like any other ESI.

This archived web content can easily be placed in litigation hold, for any or all of the web archive content, and fufill the legal call for authenticity and admissibility.