Collecting All The Embarrassing Nonsense Your Adversaries (Or Employees) Put Online

Collecting All The Embarrassing Nonsense Your Adversaries (Or Employees) Put Online


social-media-300×199Not every case turns on some damning, against interest post an adversary dropped on a Reddit board. Or, worse, that the client’s CEO placed there. But some matters will and it’s increasingly critical to have a comprehensive plan to scour web footprints of key individuals.

And to make sure that data is retained.

While there’s undoubtedly a junior attorney or paralegal out there hunting and pecking and screenshotting their way through Facebook, there are much better methods to gather — and more importantly, authenticate — someone’s web data.

Page Vault provides a software solution designed specifically for legal professionals to collect and preserve web content easily.

Page Vault’s primary customers are law firms, with around 125 of the Am Law 200 firms using the software to automate the collection of online content. There’s no need to manually capture full social media profiles or scroll through websites for relevant posts or comments. Page Vault can gather a complete Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok profile — with all comments, pictures, and videos — as well as searching full websites (up to thousands of URLs), Wayback Machine, marketplace activity, and video platforms. And the results are not limited to basic screenshots, with Page Vault offering the content in multiple formats such as PDFs or HTML.

Which can then be loaded into eDiscovery platforms for further analysis.

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Each collection includes crucial metadata — capture date, URL, post timestamps, etc. — and a SHA256 hash value, a critical feature for ensuring that the data’s integrity remains intact for legal admissibility. Page Vault also boasts built-in compliance with Federal Rules of Evidence 902(13), allowing Page Vault to provide a certification authenticating the captured content. By taking the user out of the chain of custody, Page Vault provides a valuable tool for maintaining the integrity of this collected content.

The legal tech world may be saturated with generative AI conversations, but as I attend these conferences, the big — non-AI — issue that keeps coming up is developing more and more robust and efficient methods of gathering data. Whether it’s phones or an individual’s web footprint, “getting data” is a problem everyone still has that AI isn’t going to fix.

And, sure, you’re going to lose the billable hour of whichever junior you’d sent off to make screenshots, but Page Vault seems like a much better option in the long run.


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.





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