Insights · Evidence & intelligence
The gap that sinks most evidence packs
The gap that sinks an evidence pack is almost never the missing document. It is the undated one that nobody can place in the sequence.
Ask anyone preparing for a hearing, a panel or an assessment what they are worried about and they will tell you about the document they cannot find. In practice, the missing document is rarely fatal. Its absence can be explained, and often the absence is itself evidence of something.
The document that causes real damage is the one you do have, which cannot be placed in time. An undated note, an email printed without headers, a form with a signature and no date, a photograph with no metadata. Each of these is unusable at exactly the moment you need it, because it cannot be tied to the sequence.
There is a second-order problem. Undated material invites the other side to place it wherever suits them. You are then arguing about the date rather than the substance, and you are doing it from the weaker position, because it is your document.
The fix is unglamorous and works. Date at the point of creation, not at the point of filing. Keep originals in the format they arrived in. When you print an email, print the headers. When you take a note of a conversation, record when the note was written as well as when the conversation happened — they are not the same fact, and the difference will be asked about.
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