Every practitioner meets the case where the thing that would settle the question does not exist. Sometimes it never did, sometimes it was destroyed on a retention schedule, and occasionally it was destroyed by the person it would have hurt. None of those is the end of the matter, but each calls for a different response, and the worst of the available responses is to say nothing about the gap at all. This subject sets out secondary evidence and its rules, how a record is reconstructed from fragments, and what a decision-maker does with evidence somebody made disappear.
A declaration of loss establishes the unavailability that secondary evidence depends on. It must identify the document precisely, state what it contained, describe how it was lost and set out the search undertaken. Statements that assert loss without specifics fail, and where the declarant is not the person who lost the document, that has to be explained.
