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First Look: Page Vault
Page Vault captures web content, such as blogs, social media sites, and news websites and formats and authenticates it so it can be admitted as evidence in court.
Printing and Screenshotting Always Looks Terrible
Typically, when lawyers—or anyone else, for that matter—want to preserve a web page, they are forced to print the browser page or take a screenshot. To begin with, both of those methods have aesthetic problems. Unless the page is optimized,1 printing from the browser page (or saving the browser page as a PDF) results in a lot of cruft—the ads on the page, the headers and footers, etc. Taking a screenshot is just fine if you only need one screen’s worth of information, but if the page you want to capture is longer than the screen, you have to take multiple screenshots.
Potentially, lawyers have more than just aesthetic problems with the printing method and the screenshot method—there’s no authentication of the page, and at least in some jurisdictions, that may mean a web page is inadmissible. Page Vault seeks to solve both the aesthetic problems and the authentication problem.
How Page Vault Works
Page Vault works on both Windows and Mac. It isn’t a browser plugin, however. Instead, you install a standalone program that allows you to access Page Vault remotely. This means you have to capture pages within Page Vault’s proprietary browser interface.
It is slightly clunky to move from your regular surfing to Page Vault, but it isn’t a huge user obstacle.
Documents are stored in the cloud so that you can get to them via a regular browser. Anything you capture via Page Vault gives you a cover page with all the metadata of the website, including date of capture.
For an additional fee, Page Vault can also provide an affidavit to assist in authenticating your data.
The most appealing thing about Page Vault is probably its Facebook expander feature. It auto-expands all the comments on a Facebook page so you don’t have to go through and manually open each, and it also knows intelligently deals with page breaks so you don’t have to wonder if some portion of the capture was missed.
Pricing
Page Vault subscription plans start at $95/month for a solo practitioner, which includes 10GB of storage and unlimited downloads. If you need Page Vault to provide an affidavit of authentication for a capture, that will cost $100/affidavit. Higher tiers range from $195/month to $495/month and include e-discovery load files if needed.
If your practice does not require regular captures, Page Vault provides on-demand web page capture services, where their team will perform the capture and provide necessary authentication. The on-demand service begins at $129 and is custom-priced per task.
Final Thoughts
Page Vault is geared towards lawyers who handle the types of cases where web-related discovery—particularly social media—is often prevalent. Practitioners in fields like personal injury, employment law, and intellectual property will find it useful to have an always-available method to capture and authenticate web pages. Lawyers in fields that don’t focus on internet evidence would likely not find a monthly subscription necessary, but the ability to use the service on an as-needed basis is great.
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Lawyerist is optimized to print and PDF beautifully, in case you were wondering ↩
First Look: Page Vault was originally published on Lawyerist.com.
Source: https://lawyerist.com/133578/first-look-page-vault/
