Legal process
How we handle requests for information.
Police, regulators, prosecutors and private parties contact us about published records — and about the material behind them. Those are two very different requests with different answers. Both are set out here, so nobody has to guess.
- Policy ref
- LEP-01
- Applies to
- Every request
- Reviewed
- Yearly
- Owner
- Editor & counsel
01Start here
Most of what you need is already public.
Most requests we receive are for material that is published, free and linked to its source. Reading the record first saves everyone a formal process.
Published records need no request
Every dossier, report and investigation is public, including the list of sources behind it. You can cite, quote and rely on it without asking us.
Sources are named, not hidden
Where a claim rests on a court document, registry extract or authority order, the source list names who issued it and when we retrieved it. In almost every case you can — and should — obtain the original directly.
Reuse is already licensed
Non-commercial republication by public bodies, courts and universities is covered by our standing terms. Read the republishing policy instead of writing in.
02Disclosure
What we will and won’t hand over.
The answer depends on one question — would disclosure expose a source? — not on who is asking. A government authority and a private claimant get the same analysis.
Already public, or simply confirming what we published.
Published material and citations
Public already. We will confirm what we published and when, with the version history.
Version and correction history
Every revision is timestamped and kept. We can produce the full log for any record.
Confirming our own publication
If a court needs confirmation that we published a given text on a given date, we will give it.
Only under a valid order, after every available challenge.
Unpublished research notes and drafts
Produced only under a valid order from a court with jurisdiction over us, after we have used every challenge open to us.
Reader and member records
Kept to a minimum and disclosed only under valid legal process. Our privacy policy explains what we keep and for how long.
Treated exactly like a source's name.
Identity of confidential sources
Never given up voluntarily, under commercial pressure or on an informal request. We will challenge any order in court — but we cannot promise absolute protection if disclosure is finally compelled by law.
Anything that could identify a source indirectly
File metadata, submission times, routing data and internal messages that could narrow down a source are protected just like a name.
03Source protection
Protecting sources is not a bargaining chip.
The archive only works because people trust us with documents. That trust has to hold in the hard cases, or it means nothing in the easy ones.
We do not identify confidential sources voluntarily — not to prosecutors, regulators, opposing lawyers or a subject threatening to sue, and never in exchange for access, money or a claim against us being dropped.
If we are served with an order seeking material that could identify a source, we will tell the source where it is lawful and safe to do so, challenge the order through every available route, and push to narrow it. We report such orders in the annual transparency report as far as we are allowed.
We are honest about the limit: no publisher can promise absolute confidentiality where a court finally compels disclosure. What we can promise is that we will fight it, and that we will never give a source up without that fight.
This covers material that identifies someone by inference, too. A set of documents only four people could have supplied identifies those four people, and we protect it as we would a name.
04Serving process
How to serve legal process on us
Process must be validly served on the operating entity. Emailing an editor is not service, and it will slow things down rather than speed them up.
- 1
Step 1
Serve counsel
Send all process to the address on our legal page, for the attention of counsel, listing the records concerned by URL.
- 2
Step 2
Scope review
We check jurisdiction, validity and scope. Requests that reach unpublished material or source data are challenged as standard.
- 3
Step 3
Tell the source
Where it is lawful and safe, affected sources are told before anything is produced, so they can protect themselves.
- 4
Step 4
Challenge or narrow
We contest orders that reach source-identifying material, and confine any we cannot defeat to the narrowest set we can defend.
- 5
Step 5
Log it publicly
The request is reported in total in the annual transparency report unless an order forbids it — and such orders are reported where allowed.
05What we don’t do
The answer doesn’t change with the rank of whoever asks.
- We don’t investigate to order.We take no assignments from police, regulators, intelligence services, parties to disputes or private clients. Nobody outside the editorial team chooses our subjects — taking a tasking would end our independence and our usefulness at once.
- We aren’t a back channel.Off-the-record briefings on unpublished material, requests to hold a record while an operation runs, and quiet confirmations of what we hold are all declined. If it is worth asking, ask formally.
- We don’t take records down on request.Published material is not removed because it is awkward for a live investigation or a party to a case. Show us something is wrong and we correct it publicly — a different remedy, and the only one we offer.
- We don’t sell expert opinion.We will confirm our own publications for a court. We will not provide analysis, opinion evidence or risk conclusions to either side of a dispute.
Think a record is wrong? A correction is quicker than a court case.
It is also public, which is usually what the person named actually wants. Send the document that contradicts us and it goes through the same checks as everything else in the archive.