Overview
Most matters arrive the same way. Counsel is three weeks in, the pleadings are on file, and it has become clear that the dispute turns on something that happened inside an advertising or analytics system — but not which system, not which record inside it, and not who has to be asked for it. This layer of the site exists for that moment. It is organized by channel, because the records are organized by the machine that produced them, and because a discovery request has to name an object rather than a subject.
That last point does most of the work. A request for all marketing data returns a folder of PDFs and a fight about proportionality. A request for the change history of a named advertising account across a stated date range, the platform-issued billing records for the same months, and the analytics property’s configuration history returns things that can be compared to each other. The channel tells you which objects exist and what they are called. That is what these pages are for.
Paid media — where money was spent and what it bought
Search advertising, display and programmatic, paid social, and online advertising generally. These are auction systems: money moves through a platform, and the platform keeps the authoritative record of what it charged, what it delivered, and what changed in the account. The useful objects are specific. Platform-issued invoices and billing records. The reporting interface’s own cost figures, by campaign and by day. Change history, which logs what changed, when, and under which login. Click-level records keyed to a click identifier, which have the shortest life of anything in this field. Search terms data, which omits terms that do not have enough query activity to meet the platform’s stated privacy threshold — so the export is a filtered list rather than the population, and coverage is not comparable across the dates on which those thresholds changed. Invalid-activity credits, which appear on the billing record rather than in the cost column for the day they relate to.
The reason these pages are labeled platform-held is that the decisive record sits with Google, Meta, Amazon or an ad server, and is obtained by production from a party that has account access or by subpoena to the platform. It is also the reason a paid media matter has a clock on it that the parties do not control.
Organic and owned — channels a party controls rather than buys
Social media, email, content and digital media, affiliate. Here the record usually sits with a party, which changes the argument entirely: instead of asking whether a record can be obtained, the fight is over whether what was produced is complete. Account-level exports, publishing histories, message and comment archives, sending platform logs, affiliate network reporting and payout records, content management system revision histories. Several of these have a second copy held by a vendor — an email service provider, an affiliate network, a social platform’s own export tool — and that second copy is frequently the more useful one, precisely because the party did not assemble it.
Party-held does not mean unreliable. It means completeness is a contested question rather than an assumed one, and an analysis built on a single party-supplied export needs to say so on its face.
Commerce and retail — where the transaction happens
E-commerce, retail and merchandising, websites and conversion. Marketplace matters have a structural feature worth knowing before the first discovery conference: the seller often does not hold the transaction record at all. Orders, advertising performance, buy-box and placement data, and returns sit with the marketplace, on reporting windows measured in weeks rather than years, and a seller whose account has been suspended may have lost access to the interface that would have exported it. On an owned site the position is better — server logs, order records, the platform’s own database, tag and template revision history — but the analytics layer over the top of it has its own retention limits.
Measurement — the systems that claim to say what worked
Analytics and tracking, and attribution and return on investment. This group is different in kind from the other three, and the difference is the most important thing on this page. Analytics records are party-held and, more than any other record here, are a record of a configuration: what was measured, from when, by whom, with which filters and which definitions. Two properties measuring the same website can produce different numbers honestly. The configuration history is often more probative than the numbers.
Attribution is further along the same line, and it is the one place on this site where the honest label is modeled: no primary record of causation exists. An attribution model allocates credit among touchpoints according to a rule someone chose. It never observed a cause. Changing the model, the conversion window, or which conversion actions are included moves the reported figure without a single sale changing, which is exactly why the configuration history matters in a dispute where compensation was tied to that figure.
Reading the label at the top of each page
Every page in this category opens with one judgment: platform-held means the decisive record sits with a platform and is obtainable; party-held means it sits in the parties’ own systems and its completeness is itself in issue; modeled means no primary record exists and every available figure is an estimate produced by a method. The third state is why the scale is worth having. It is the accurate answer for part of this field, and an expert who does not say it out loud is an expert whose report has a hole in it that opposing counsel will find.
Two facts recur across all four groups. The first is that the decisive record is usually held by a third party rather than by either side, which makes the discovery route as important as the theory. The second is that those third parties delete on published schedules that run whether or not a complaint has been filed — and no litigation hold binds them. A hold letter obliges the parties to preserve what they control; it has no effect on a platform’s retention clock. That is why the first question in one of these matters is not what happened but what still exists.
Use this layer to find out what record you are actually looking for, then use the matter pages to find out which element of the claim it has to serve. The channel does not tell you what has to be proven, whether the contested element is standard of care, causation or quantum, or whether a record is worth the motion it would take to get it. Those questions belong to the claim, and the claim is the other half of this site.
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