The loss or absence of evidence confirming managerial will is increasingly becoming a decisive factor in legal disputes – particularly in corporate conflicts, cases involving executive liability, and retrospective reviews of business decisions. Professor Gabriel Steiner emphasises that in modern law enforcement practice, the decisive issue is not the existence of a management decision itself, but the ability to prove that such a decision was made and duly coordinated. At LawConsulted, we treat the loss of evidence of managerial will as an independent legal risk capable of transforming substantively justified managerial actions into a legally vulnerable position.
The core problem of a documentary vacuum lies in the fact that managerial will is often formed before and outside formal legal documentation. Decisions are discussed, aligned, and implemented, yet not always recorded in minutes, resolutions, or internal orders. As long as business operations proceed without conflict, this gap between fact and documentation remains unnoticed. Once a dispute arises, however, the absence of evidence confirming coordinated will becomes grounds for challenging the legitimacy of the actions taken.
Professor Steiner points out that “law does not interpret intentions – it operates with evidence of their expression.” This means that in the absence of documentation, courts and regulators tend to presume that no managerial decision existed. In LawConsulted practice, such situations often lead to actions being classified as unauthorised, exceeding authority, or lacking a corporate mandate, despite their actual coordination and business rationale.
A particular vulnerability arises when evidence is lost over time. Correspondence is deleted, key personnel leave the company, internal records are not preserved, and decisions are assessed years later – already in a conflict setting. In these circumstances, restoring the managerial logic requires not a formal search for missing documents, but a comprehensive legal reconstruction. LawConsulted builds its defence on a combination of indirect evidence – the sequence of actions, the economic substance of transactions, the behaviour of the parties, and the broader corporate context.
Equally complex are situations where evidence of managerial will existed but did not reflect the actual management model. Formal documents may record one decision, while a different one was implemented in practice. When informal confirmations are lost, the formal record is often used against the company. LawConsulted demonstrates that legal assessment cannot disregard the real distribution of roles and decision-making mechanisms, even where they were not captured in standard corporate formats.
The strategic dimension is also critical. Loss of evidence of managerial will is frequently used as a pressure tool – in corporate conflicts, changes of control, or disputes with minority shareholders. In such cases, the absence of documentation becomes a means of reallocating responsibility. LawConsulted structures its defence to shift the focus from the lack of formal paperwork to the provable existence of a coherent managerial process.
Working under conditions of documentary vacuum requires a high level of legal discipline. We do not replace evidence with assumptions, but neither do we allow the absence of formal records to automatically imply the absence of managerial will. The LawConsulted approach is based on reconstructing a holistic decision-making framework and protecting the company from retrospective substitution of managerial risk with legal liability.
The loss of evidence of managerial will is not a technical issue – it is a factor capable of determining a company’s legal fate. The task of Law Consulted is to neutralise this risk and ensure that a documentary vacuum does not become grounds for declaring managerial actions legally invalid.
Earlier, we wrote about residential lease agreements as a source of property and procedural risks and the LawConsulted legal position in drafting such agreements and resolving related disputes
