What is recorded about a document

This page used to say Pertavo kept no readable log. It kept one and gave nobody a way to read it; since October 2026 there are two screens that do, so the honest answer has changed. If you planned around the old answer, this is what replaced it.

Where you read it

• On a matter. The Activity panel at the bottom of the matter page: everything recorded against the matter and against the documents filed on it, newest first.
• Across the firm. Settings → Activity, filterable by what was done. Staff only — a client belongs to your firm but has no business reading what it did with another client’s files, and a log line’s own text can name one.

Both obey the access rules that apply everywhere else. The matter view reuses the matter’s own gate, so with ethical walls on, an attorney who cannot reach the matter cannot read its history either.

What is recorded

• Opens. That somebody viewed a document, and when.
• Downloads. Every time, including by a client.
• Uploads, with who and when — also still on the file itself and in the list.
• Changes to a document, and deletions.
• Signature requests and signatures, and invitations sent to new people.
• Exports — that a firm archive was asked for, and that it was downloaded.

One thing it does on purpose

Repeated opens of the same file by the same person are shown once a day. Somebody opens the same lease a dozen times in an afternoon, and an unfiltered log would be almost entirely opens — with the row that matters, a deletion or a download by somebody who should not have, unfindable in it.

Downloads are not collapsed. Those are shown every time, because “again” is the interesting part of a download and not of a read.

What it still does not do

• It does not say which document. An open or a download is recorded against the file, but the row reads “opened a document” rather than naming it — so the log answers who and when, and you match it to what by reading it on the matter rather than firm-wide.
• No log on the document’s own page. The history is read on the matter or across the firm, not on the file.
• No export of the log. It is read on screen. The firm archive carries your data, not this.
• No alerts. Nothing emails you because a file was downloaded at two in the morning. Somebody has to look.
• It does not say what changed. That a document was edited is written down; what changed inside it is not.
• No retention guarantee, and no tamper-proofing. These rows live in the same database as everything else. Nothing signs them, nothing seals them, and no policy promises how long they are kept.

Before you tell a regulator about it

You can now answer “who opened this” from inside Pertavo, and that is worth having. It is not the same as an evidential audit trail: nothing here is independently attested, immutable, or examined by anybody — see security for what has and has not been audited, and GDPR and data protection for obligations of that kind.

So: use it to answer your own questions about your own firm. Do not describe it as a certified access log, because no page here will.