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0. Scope, Non-Goals, and Document Conventions

0.1 Scope

This document specifies a baseline architectural standard for Reconstruction-Grade eDiscovery in collaborative cloud environments. The standard focuses on the minimum properties required to preserve and export evidence such that reconstruction is deterministic, auditable, and reproducible.

0.2 Non-Goals (Out of Scope)

This standard does not:

  • Provide legal advice or define admissibility standards; it defines an architectural preservation and export baseline.
  • Require or assume full-tenant "archive everything" capture.
  • Mandate a specific vendor, product, cloud provider, storage backend, review platform, or deployment topology.
  • Guarantee perfect behavioral visibility; audit evidence is explicitly bounded by licensing, retention, and upstream availability.
  • Require semantic analytics, relevance scoring, or LLM-based workflows.
  • Replace existing review platforms; it specifies what an upstream preservation record MUST provide to downstream systems.

0.3 Threat Model (What This Standard Is Designed to Withstand)

Reconstruction-Grade properties matter because evidence is evaluated under adversarial or high-scrutiny conditions, including:

  • Court challenges to authenticity, completeness, proportionality, and chain of custody.
  • Regulator inquiries requiring auditability and repeatability.
  • Internal investigations where timelines, identity state, and access behavior are disputed.
  • Repeat exports where differences MUST be explained without operator narrative.

This standard assumes that any ambiguous, inferred, or non-reproducible claim will be challenged. Therefore, it prioritizes:

  • Deterministic resolution rules and explicit fallback documentation.
  • Stable identifiers and relationship bindings.
  • Explicit exceptions (no silent drops).
  • Export manifests with hash and integrity support.
  • Clear boundedness statements when upstream evidence is incomplete.

0.4 Normative Language

This document uses MUST, SHOULD, and MAY as normative requirement levels:

  • MUST indicates a required property for Reconstruction-Grade conformance.
  • SHOULD indicates a strong recommendation that materially improves reconstruction.
  • MAY indicates an optional capability that can improve outcomes but is not required for baseline conformance.