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Auditing and Digital Paper Trail

Wise Owl Legal support a variety of auditing functions to comply with legal requirements for transparency and external auditing. In addition, audit logs are useful to ensure the correct and error free operation of your Wise Owl Legal appliance.

There are different auditing mechanisms used by Wise Owl, they all create a digital paper trail, but some are focused on particular modules or scenarios  For example, the entire trust accounting system is designed from the ground up to leave an auditable, transparent digital paper trail. Other system functions and events are logged in a more generic audit log which can also be used as a digital paper trail.

TODO: reports

TODO: compliance with legal standards

Trust Accounting

TODO

Generic Audit Log

The generic audit log is a system wide repository of events. It's purpose is to log important events in the system such as changes to matters, user logins and system updates. Records are uneditable once created. Audit records are only accessible to administrators of Wise Owl and helpdesk staff.

Audit records contain, at minimum:

  • When the event occurred.
  • What kind of event it was.
  • Who (what user) initiated the event.
  • The IP Address of the user who initiated the event.
  • A brief summary of the event.

Additional information can be recorded, depending on the context of the event:

  • Did the event succeed or fail. Eg: a login may fail due to an incorrect password.
  • Additional details of the event. These vary considerably depending on event type and context.
  • A snapshot before and after the event. Eg: when a matter or system setting is changed, the data before and after is recorded.
  • A variety of associated record ids. These represent other records in Wise Owl which are relevant to the event being audited. Eg: the matter id will be recorded against the audit record when a matter changes. Or, for a password reset, both the user who resets the password and the user who's password is being reset are recorded.

Information from the audit log is searchable via the Tools module.

Events Recorded

The following lists each event audited by Wise Owl Legal:

  • Support / Feedback Requests - their details are saved in the audit log, as well as being sent to the Wise Owl Helpdesk.
  • Unsupported Browser Override - if a user ignores the warning that their browser is unsupported or out of date.
  • Install Update - a system update is installed.
  • System Setting Changed - before and after snapshots are taken of the setting.
  • TODO: user login related
  • TODO: matter / contact changes

Appliance Logs

The Wise Owl Appliance keeps low level system logs. These contain information primarily relevant to technical support, debugging and performance analysis. They can be accessed from the Tools module and exported to an Excel compatible format for external analysis. The appliance logs are where details of errors are recorded, plus a variety of other data and statistics. They are not designed to maintain a digital paper trail, but may be used as supporting evidence.

TODO: streaming important messages back to our stats server???

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