Part 1 – Chain of Custody Chaos: How Everyday IT Workflows Undermine Evidentiary Integrity
Contributed by: Kris Carlson, LCG COO, Former ICAC Commander, and Digital Forensics Investigator/Testifying Expert
“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Introduction
In today’s workplace, the center of gravity for digital evidence has shifted. As cloud collaboration, hybrid work, and mobile productivity become permanent features of business life, corporate IT teams have emerged as de facto custodians of data that may later become evidence. This isn’t inherently problematic—after all, IT teams control the systems that generate, store, and secure that data. However, trouble begins when the electronic discovery, or worse, forensic responsibilities that traditionally fell to certified digital examiners and eDiscovery experts are absorbed into everyday administrative workflows.
In today’s corporate marketplace, the trend is to do more with less, and litigation preparedness and response is no different. When litigation strikes, companies lean on their internal IT professionals, as they do for nearly anything that is technology-related but may have little to do with their primary responsibilities. At the request of their superiors, IT personnel use familiar tools to gather what they believe to be relevant information. Microsoft 365 admins may run a Content Search, download .pst files, and email the results to Legal. A systems engineer might clone a server VM from a nightly backup. A mobile device manager may pull selected files from an employee’s iPhone. From an operational perspective, these actions are logical and efficient. From a legal standpoint, however, they can be catastrophic.
Why? Because the legal system doesn’t reward effort or care about efficiency, it demands a process that is consistent and defensible. Chain of custody, forensic soundness, and evidentiary reliability are not automatically inherited by virtue of data location or ownership. These things are achieved only through disciplined handling that aligns with recognized standards, such as ISO/IEC 27037, which lays out a four-part framework for digital evidence: identification, collection, acquisition, and preservation (ISO/IEC 27037).
In this installment, we dissect how everyday IT workflows, however well-intentioned, can break the forensic chain of custody, often before the first motion is filed.
What Counts as ‘Evidence’ in 2025?
As organizations generate exponentially more data, the line between “business information” and “legal evidence” has become increasingly blurred. In 2025, digital evidence is more than just emails or file shares—it includes Slack threads, Teams meeting transcripts, internal messaging, mobile app logs, system metadata, and even ephemeral records like browser history or IoT device logs. Virtually any digital trace left behind by employees, systems, or workflows could discoverable and become evidence in civil litigation, regulatory investigations, or criminal proceedings.
The challenge is that these data types often reside in dynamic, cloud-hosted environments governed by proprietary APIs and default sync behavior, not forensic-grade controls. When the litigation hold is issued or an investigation begins, time is of the essence. But haste, if not guided by forensic discipline, can degrade or destroy evidentiary value. The first mistake? Assuming that IT-collected data though “good enough” for internal review and investigation, may not be for the court.
Chain of Custody vs. the ‘Admin Console Export’
Forensic chain of custody is not a metaphor; it is a documented, step-by-step record of how digital evidence was identified, acquired, transported, stored, and analyzed, with verifiable integrity checks at each step. This chain ensures that the evidence introduced in court is the same as it was at the time of acquisition, and that it has not been altered, intentionally or inadvertently.
Compare that to a standard data export of “responsive files” using standard Windows copy or a third-party file copying utility that might be commonly IT teams under pressure to collect digital evidence. These exports are typically downloaded to removable media or to an internal network location with no cryptographic hash value provided at source, no data write blocking, no forensic logging, and no immutable storage of the source artifact. Even worse, the act of performing the export may inadvertently alter the metadata of the files themselves, changing last accessed times or modifying other data.
Contrast this with a proper forensic acquisition. A certified digital examiner would create a forensic image of the entire source drive/directory using tools like FTK Imager (AccessData), X-Ways Forensics (X-Ways Software), or Magnet AXIOM (Magnet Forensics), employing a hardware or software write blocker to prevent any modification to the source data. They would generate hash values of the original evidence and validate it post-acquisition, producing a report that documents every action taken.
Courts take these distinctions seriously. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 901 (FRE 901), parties must show that evidence is what they claim it to be, often requiring hash verification or expert testimony.
How IT Automations Alter Metadata
Metadata—such as file timestamps, access logs, and system properties—is often more legally significant than the content of the files themselves. In intellectual property theft cases, for example, knowing that a file was copied to a USB drive at 11:42 p.m. can be more damning than the file’s actual contents.
Yet modern IT ecosystems are built for usability, not forensic fidelity. Backup utilities may update “last accessed” timestamps. Sync tools rewrite “created” dates to match the time of download. Antivirus and other IT scans may trigger file attribute changes. In managed device environments, MDM platforms can silently apply configuration changes that overwrite log data.
Even something as innocuous as opening a cloud-based document in preview mode can update metadata. This is particularly concerning when an IT technician is attempting to verify file relevance prior to collection. Simply accessing the evidence to confirm its existence may alter it, especially in cloud platforms with aggressive versioning and metadata policies.
The NIST Computer Forensic Tool Testing (CFTT) Program emphasizes the need for forensic tools to preserve metadata integrity, a requirement not met by most IT-oriented utilities.
Shadow IT and Cloud API Limitations
Despite best efforts, corporate IT teams rarely have complete visibility into all the data repositories employees use. Shadow IT, as it is referred to, includes unsanctioned repositories like personal Dropbox accounts, Signal messaging apps, or Google Docs under private credentials. These sources of data pose a growing challenge as they often lack enterprise-grade APIs, and when they do offer export options, those options are geared toward user convenience, not forensic preservation.
Even sanctioned cloud platforms are not immune. APIs from Microsoft, Google, Slack, and others often impose throttling, rate limits, or field-level restrictions. In some cases, metadata is truncated or omitted entirely from export routines. Worse still, many admin dashboards do not support validation, hashing, write blocking, or forensic logging. The lack of transparency about export behavior makes it nearly impossible to certify the authenticity of the resulting data. These are not trivial oversights; they are fundamental deviations from the expectations of courts evaluating digital evidence under various federal and state evidentiary standards.
Regulatory & Standards Context
Digital forensics is governed not only by case law but also by well-established technical standards. One of the most relevant is NIST Special Publication 800-101 Rev. 1, which addresses guidelines for mobile device forensics but includes broader forensic principles.
A key takeaway is that “forensically sound conditions” require the use of tools and procedures that do not alter the evidence and that fully document any actions taken. Sync utilities, backup software, and administrative exports typically do not meet this bar.
Similarly, ISO/IEC 27037:2012 defines international guidelines for the identification, collection, acquisition, and preservation of digital evidence. It emphasizes that these processes must be handled by qualified personnel using validated tools, with comprehensive documentation and a demonstrable chain of custody. Violating these principles risks not just evidentiary exclusion but reputational damage and litigation loss.
Conclusion
Chain of custody is like oxygen: unnoticed when intact, fatal when broken. The dangerous illusion in many organizations today is that familiarity with IT tools translates to legal defensibility. It does not.
A compromised chain of custody rarely announces itself. Instead, it lurks silently in the background, only to surface at the worst possible moment, when opposing counsel challenges authenticity, when a motion to exclude is filed, when a judge expresses skepticism. By then it is too late, discovery has closed, experts have been designated, and reports have been written. The cost is not just technical. It could be catastrophic, weakening the very foundation of the plaintiff’s allegations of a defendant’s claim of innocence. Weak evidence means weakened leverage, adverse instructions to the jury, or multimillion-dollar settlements that could have been avoided.
In Part 2 of this series, we turn from process to product. Even when workflows are correctly followed, the tools matter. We will explore why courtroom reliability hinges on forensic validation and why tools that “work for IT” may fail the test under judicial scrutiny.
