Sovereign storage for legal e-discovery

The challenge

E-discovery in commercial litigation routinely involves multi-terabyte productions of sensitive client documents, transferred under contested commercial conditions to opposing counsel, expert witnesses, and judicial review platforms. Each transfer creates exposure: residency for cross-border production, chain-of-custody for evidentiary admissibility, and revocability for redaction or claw-back.

The standard pattern — secure FTP plus a shared spreadsheet of who has access — survives only because alternatives have been worse. Modern e-discovery platforms add review-side functionality but typically don't address the underlying storage and chain-of-custody problem. The productions still live on a hyperscaler in a jurisdiction that may be the opposing party's home jurisdiction.

For privileged or work-product material, the residency question is acute. Privilege exists in the document, not the storage — but operational security of privileged documents has implications under provincial Law Society rules and increasingly forms part of pre-trial motion practice.

The architectural answer

SkyeConnex provides three properties e-discovery has historically lacked:

• Cryptographic chain-of-custody — every document's provenance chain is signed and tamper-evident. Per-file integrity certificates, dual-signed with HMAC-SHA-256 and ML-DSA-87, let opposing counsel's expert verify integrity independently — without trusting the platform, without trusting your firm.
• Per-production residency policy — productions can be configured to remain in chosen jurisdictions throughout review. Cross-border productions to foreign experts are configured under the receiving jurisdiction's residency rules rather than the producing firm's home rules.
• Revocable, audited delivery — productions are delivered via revocable share links with expiry, view limits, password protection, and external identity capture. Claw-back or hold modifications can revoke individual shares without affecting the broader production.

How it works in practice

Production preparation

Custodian data is ingested through standard e-discovery review tooling (Relativity, RelativityOne, Casepoint, etc.). Productions destined for external delivery are written to SkyeConnex with the relevant matter's compliance preset pack (typically PIPEDA + Provincial Law Society + matter-specific retention rules).

Privilege screening

Privilege-screened productions are tagged in the audit log. Claw-back motions can revoke specific share grants atomically, with timestamped evidence of the revocation moment.

Delivery to opposing counsel and experts

Productions delivered via revocable share links. The recipient's identity is captured on first access. Access patterns are monitored; unusual fetches (high volume, off-hours, geographically anomalous) surface in the audit dashboard.

Expert review

Opposing experts can verify document integrity offline using our published ML-DSA-87 issuer public key — they don't need to trust your firm. Forgery requires compromising the issuer keypair, which never leaves a hardened key-management boundary. This is the evidentiary standard courts increasingly expect.

Matter close-out

At settlement or judgement, the matter's audit log is exported as a signed archive — a permanent custody record. Retention overlays handle litigation-hold extensions where applicable.