[Tristan Lall]

Dismissing electronic records out of hand is a bit of a naïve approach to the problem. While it wouldn't be entirely surprising that the legal system might be naïve about things it doesn't encounter very often, the basic evidentiary rules are generic enough to be adapted to the purpose of distinguishing good electronic evidence from bad.

For some light¹ reading on the subject, see for example:

• Admitting Electronic Evidence in Federal Court: I've Got All This Electronic Data—Now What Do I Do With It?
• Can Juries Really Believe What They See? New Foundational Requirements for the Authentication of Digital Images

For an engineering notebook, an adequate solution might be to store it on a server or file system that incorporates robust change-logging capabilities. So much the better if the access control policy for that system prevents the notating engineer from editing the metadata that identifies the changes. Even better (at least in this respect) if the data is stored by an independent third party with no motive to tamper with the records.

One relatively straightforward implementation of this would be a content management system that uniquely identifies the source, time and content of each committed edit. For example, the ChiefDelphi forum incorporates elements of this concept (though perhaps not with the thoroughness that would be desirable in this application), and, in combination with the right corroborating material, might be used as evidence of many things. A platform like Subversion or MediaWiki has even greater value in establishing the provenance of evidence stored within.

Of course, compared to paper, you face an uphill battle in convincing a court to accept it—because it's your responsibility to demonstrate that the system is robust enough to be trusted as a source of evidence. Courts have taken judicial notice of many aspects of paper record-keeping, and as such allow many shortcuts when dealing with familiar record-keeping media.

Incidentally, there's one enormous advantage to electronic records over paper records: they're easy to store redundantly and remotely (at moderate expense, at least in the short-to-medium term). For that reason in particular, it's worth having an electronic copy of your data, whether the originals are on paper or on electronic media.

¹ As compared to other legal texts....