Tresorit as a secure shared folder

Not every case has to leave on physical media. When what the parties mainly need is to be able to consult the report and the underlying documents, rather than take them away, a secure shared folder is the channel of choice.

For the channel along which data and key reach the destination separately, see two-channel transfer.

Why not ordinary cloud sharing

A shareable link from a standard cloud service allows downloading and gives you no access logs afterwards. You then do not know who consulted what and when, and you cannot find out any more either.

With a shared case file that is exactly what you need. Sooner or later the question comes whether the opposing party actually received and read the preliminary report, and at that point you want a better answer than that you sent a link.

Why not a virtual data room

A virtual data room does everything you want here, and more. It also easily costs €250 to €350 a month. Against an assignment worth a few thousand euro that outlay is out of proportion, and that is not a matter of taste: article 5 of the code of conduct requires the expert to limit the cost of his investigations to what is strictly necessary to complete the assignment.

A secure shared folder costs a fraction of that and delivers the same three functions. Reckon on fifteen to twenty euro per user per month on the Business plan, with a minimum of three users; check the current rates, because they change.

The choice for this category of tool also follows from article 15 of the same code: given the sensitive nature of the data, the expert has to take organisational and technical measures preventing an unauthorised third party from taking cognisance of it. A shared folder with access control meets that; a public link does not.

The three settings that make the difference

All three sit under Link settings of the shared folder. They belong to the link and not to the folder as a whole, so anyone who shares the same folder twice configures it twice.

Start by switching on Disable download. The parties then view the documents in the browser and no copy lands on their own disk to lead a life of its own later.

For authentication there are two settings that are easily confused:

  • Require email to view lets in anyone with the link, provided they enter and verify an email address.
  • Allowed viewers lets in only the addresses you list yourself.

For a court file you take the second. The first does yield a name with every consultation, but it stops nobody who forwards the link. The circle of who may consult the file is fixed in the assignment, and that circle is what the setting should reflect.

Finally, switch on Detailed access logs. The export file holds, per event, the timestamp, the event type, the email address of whoever opened it, the IP address, the country and the city. Because it is exportable, it can serve as an annex to the report proving that all parties genuinely consulted it.

Watermark

A dynamic watermark puts the viewer’s email address and the time of opening across the page. It works on pdf, docx, xlsx, ppt, md and the common image formats. With video, disable download switches on automatically along with it.

Weigh it per case. The watermark discourages the screenshot that goes round anyway, but it also makes ordinary reading harder. With documents the parties have to work through thoroughly, that is a real cost.

The pitfall you hit once

When downloading is off, anything the built-in viewer cannot render is simply unreadable. No file appears, and the party who cannot open it reports that at the worst conceivable moment.

The viewer renders doc, docx, pdf, txt, md, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, jpg, jpeg, png, bmp and mp4. CSV is not among them, and a CSV is precisely what an export from an e-discovery platform or a log file produces.

Convert such files in advance to a format the viewer does render, xlsx for tables and pdf for anything that has to serve as an exhibit, and keep the original beside it in the same folder. That way you can account for the conversion and a party wanting the raw data can ask for it. After converting, check that every file genuinely opens with downloading off. Do that from a browser window where you are not signed in, otherwise you are testing your own access instead of the parties’.

Organising the folder

One subfolder per procedural step, with the date in the name, built up cumulatively: the preliminary report stays in place beside the final one. That way the chronology of the expert investigation is visible in the folder structure itself, and nobody has to reconstruct what was available when.

Delete nothing while the assignment is running. A document that disappears from a folder whose access logs are being kept is a hole you have to explain afterwards.

Requesting logs in tegenspraak

At the opening meeting with the parties, agree that both the court and the parties can request the access logs, and that you share the answer with all parties every time. A log you would show selectively is no longer evidence. That is what tegenspraak comes down to in practice: the adversarial principle governing the Belgian expert investigation, under which nothing reaches one party that does not reach the others at the same time.

There is a professional-conduct side to it as well. The logs contain IP addresses and timestamps of identified persons; supplying them unilaterally to one party produces exactly the kind of contact article 5 of the code requires you to avoid.

Duration of the share

If the judgment says nothing about it, choose a term yourself, write it down, and state that extension is possible subject to the court’s agreement. Leave the share open tacitly until somebody happens to think of it, and you are no longer managing the access, you merely configured it once.

What goes into the report

  • Which settings were on, under their own names.
  • From when until when the sharing ran.
  • Which files were converted and into what format, with a note that the originals sit beside them.
  • The access logs as an annex.

Sources