-Alex Bondarevskyi Most startups build for speed, growth, and feature velocity. Few build with legal scrutiny in mind. Yet if your product handles regulated or sensitive data, you will face legal requests. Those requests might ask for every record touching a user over specific dates. When that happens, your systems must answer accurately and quickly. If your architecture cannot produce complete, ordered, and verifiable records under pressure, your team will spend weeks reconstructing history. Engineering time will be diverted from product work to legal firefighting. Your company’s credibility could suffer, and legal costs could grow into six figures. In regulated industries, readiness for legal requests means engineering systems that treat auditability and traceability as core design concerns, not afterthoughts. Build Like You Will Be Subpoenaed Discovery and legal production are no longer slow, paper‑based exercises. They rely on electronic systems and data at scale. Emails, application logs, chat messages, transaction records, and internal documents all become potential evidence. The cost of producing that evidence depends less on legal strategy and more on how data ...