[DannyBee]

Lawyer here. This is right. Unlike some of the typical software use cases, md5 is usually not the only thing stopping you from falsifying evidence.

The records being produced almost always exist and the hash is being used to differentiate which is which and whether you got are correct copies.

If evil litigant produces fake documents instead of real ones, and you can't get access to the system they came from, no hash will save you - they can produce any hash they want and you can't verify against an original.

If you can verify against the original, forensics isn't going to look at a hash and say "hash matches my job is done".

Most of the time what matters is whether the evidence exists or not.

The tobacco companies lied and claimed they never had any evidence in the first place.

assume instead they wanted to falsify the data to say that as far as they could tell smoking did not cause cancer.

this is not a hashing problem. This is a problem of making up fake studies that look real.