Home · Guides · updated 2 September 2026

Who should sign Part A

The commonest defect in a chat filing is not a missing certificate. It is a certificate signed by the wrong person — usually whoever was easiest to get a signature from.

The test is control, not ownership

Part A asks the deponent to say that the device was, during the material period, in their lawful control and in regular use. Both words do work.

• Lawful control is about entitlement to use the device, not title to it. A company phone issued to an employee is in that employee’s lawful control. A phone taken from a spouse’s bag is not.
• Regular use is about ordinariness. The conversation has to have arrived in the course of using the phone as a phone, not in the course of assembling evidence.

Ownership does not appear in the clause and is not the question. The person whose name is on the connection may not be the person who used it.

Who this usually is

• A party to the conversation who exported it from their own handset. This is the clean case and the one to aim for.
• An employee or officer of a company, for a conversation on a phone issued to them, where the messages are the company’s business. Say in what capacity they held it.
• A group participant, for a group conversation. Any participant’s device produces the same conversation; the one who exported it is the deponent. See group chats.

Who it should not be

• The advocate. They did not hold the phone and did not receive the messages. Settling and filing the certificate is the advocate’s job; making the declaration is not.
• A clerk, junior or office assistant who operated the laptop the file was copied onto. Copying a file is not producing the record.
• A relative who helped with the phone. Assistance is not control.
• A person deposing on information. Part A is a first-hand declaration. “I am informed and believe that the said device was in regular use” is not the clause the Schedule sets out, and reads exactly as weakly in cross-examination as it looks on paper.

When the right person is not available

This is the genuinely hard case, and the answer is not to have someone else sign anyway.

• The other side holds the conversation. An application for production of the record, and where necessary for the device to be examined, is the route. A certificate you sign about a phone you never held is not.
• The holder has died or cannot be traced. Take instructions on the secondary-evidence position generally. It is a question for an advocate on the facts, not one a form solves.
• The holder is a witness rather than a party. They can sign Part A themselves and be called to it. That is ordinary, and it is much stronger than a second-hand declaration by the party.
• Both parties have the conversation. If the material exchange was with you, your own device is the better source. Reach for it first.

The particulars follow the person

The deponent has to be able to fill in the device block: make and model, operating system, identifier, the number the account runs on, and their relationship to the device. If the person signing cannot answer those from the phone in front of them, they are the wrong person — the form is telling you so.

The same test applies to the export step. The deponent should be the one who took the export, or should have watched it being taken, because Part A is a statement about how the record came to exist. Handing a phone to someone else and signing for what came back is how an account of production falls apart under cross-examination.

One deponent, one device, one record

Where a filing draws on two phones — a conversation from yours and another from a colleague’s — that is two records, two exports, two hashes and two certificates. Rolling them into a single declaration by whoever is convenient is the shortcut that invites the objection, and it is easily avoided: certify each record in the name of the person who produced it.

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This guide explains procedure and states the law as we understand it. It is not legal advice, and Aarohan Enterprises is not a law firm. Whether a court admits a particular record, and what weight it gives it, is for that court to decide. Have an advocate settle anything you intend to file.