Discovery Scope Creep

Evidence behaves like a character in these stories. It hides. It reappears. It gets renamed, gets stripped of metadata, or betrays the person trying to tame it.

Discovery is the eighth issue of Scope Creep Press, an unconventional fiction magazine in book form. Three longer stories and three shorter pieces about legal ops and litigation support at Hartwell & Associates, where process becomes more important than justice and tidy processes are records of bad faith.

A bloodhound e-discovery tech races a timing trap: documents ready before a client call, then moved into review long enough to blunt their legal force. Calendar hold, hot set, privilege bucket, partner markup, and export manifest each make the delay more legible, until he produces what he's ordered to produce and preserves the index proving the order mattered. A magpie finds one missing document in an older index but not the live folder, and follows log edits, upload history, and client language to keep the honest chain surviving in one physical place. An elephant litigation support manager faces a blame-note standoff under deadline after the relevant emails were never preserved—she reconstructs the hold path from template, ticket, calendar, and recipient list, then refuses to sign the lie.

The shorter pieces are locked-room evidence stories. A rat paralegal opens a folder titled 'If We Lose' and finds the bad outcome was planned before the case existed. A fox treats a PDF-only email chain as a forged object rather than a missing attachment—header absence, font mismatch, a quoted reply no one can produce. A crow watches black bars remove names that don't belong to the case; by comparing versions, he sees the redaction order is the confession.

The law firm handles contracts from Lowest Bid. One client is St. Vincent's from Critical Hours. Chat logs overlap with IT cases from Ticket Closed.

Created through a combination of human writing and generative AI, used for internal consistency across an interconnected multi-issue series.