The Brief · What changed in legal technology this week, written for Orange County firms.Read the latest

WYEA / Platform / Connected sources

Platform

It reads your systems. It does not replace them.

Documents stay where your people already put them. The platform connects to the store, reads versions from it, and writes back only where you turn that on. Nothing about your filing has to change first.

The connector layer

Built against five stores, not one

Dropbox is the first adapter. The port exists so the next four do not require rewriting the platform.

Dropboxrev
SharePoint and OneDrivedriveItemVersion.id
Google DriverevisionId
iManageversion / subversion
NetDocumentsversion / subversion
Outlookinbound mail, as a proposal

Why it is not one interface

Providers vary in ways you cannot paper over

A lowest common denominator port would either promise things a provider cannot do, or throw away the guarantees a good one gives you.

What actually differs

Four axes, and each of them changes what the platform can honestly say about a document it just read.

How long a version lasts

Dropbox keeps history for 30 days on some plans and ten years on others, and upgrading is not retroactive.

Whether there is a digest at all

Some platforms hand back a content hash. Others do not, and the connector has to declare that rather than invent one.

Whether the provider models matters

Some do. Most do not, and the mapping from folders to matters becomes per-firm configuration.

What the platform refuses to do

The failure mode here is quiet, and it invalidates evidence in bulk rather than one document at a time.

Substitute a timestamp for a version

A modification time or a path is not a version identity. A connector that cannot supply one says so instead.

Bind a claim to current

A read may ask for current, but the connector resolves it to a concrete version before returning bytes.

Treat a rename as a change

Rename and move alter neither the object id nor the version, so they do not disturb evidence already recorded.

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