Chain of custody when an AI reads your evidence

Chain of custody is the documented, unbroken record of who handled a piece of evidence and what they did with it. When the record has gaps, the evidence can be challenged or thrown out. The moment an AI tool touches a case file, it becomes part of that record, whether or not it was designed to be.

The problem with a black box

Most AI tools cannot tell you what they did. They take a document, return an answer, and keep no defensible account of the steps in between. If opposing counsel asks how a conclusion was reached, "the model produced it" is not an answer that holds up.

A cloud tool adds a second gap: the evidence also left your premises and was processed somewhere you do not control. Now there are two parts of the story you cannot fully account for.

Recording every action

Modus V writes each analyst action against the case file to a tamper-evident audit ledger. The ledger is append-only, so any later alteration is detectable. From ingestion through analysis, there is a record of what was loaded, what was examined, and what was produced.

Because the appliance is on-premise and air-gapped, that record stays inside your building too. You are not reconstructing what a vendor's servers did. You have the account on hardware you hold.

Built around the duties, not against them

Criminal and civil practice carry real obligations: grand-jury secrecy, victim privacy, and Brady and Giglio disclosure duties. A tool that cannot show its work makes those obligations harder. Modus V is designed so the record supports them, which is why it is built for law firms, prosecutors, and government investigators rather than as a general cloud product.