Home › AmbitionBox Review Removal
A damaging AmbitionBox review is not a branding problem — it is an evidence problem. 🔍 AmbitionBox removes content that breaks its own community guidelines, and it leaves a genuine, if unflattering, review exactly where it is. Whether a review comes down rarely depends on how unfair it feels to the employer. It depends on whether you can show, with the kind of proof AmbitionBox’s own moderators ask for, that a specific guideline has been broken.
This page sets out what AmbitionBox actually removes, why most self-filed reports go nowhere, what a rejection means, and how to tell a legitimate removal service from one that will get a company page flagged. It is written for HR teams and founders who have already clicked “Report” on a review and heard nothing back. 💬
❓ Can an AmbitionBox Review Actually Be Removed?
Yes — but only when the review breaches a specific community guideline, and only on that basis. AmbitionBox does not remove a review because an employer disputes it, because it is old, or because it is damaging. It removes content that breaks a published rule. Everything on this page is about finding which rule applies to your review, and proving it.
This is the part most employers get wrong. They report a review as “unfair” and it stays up. AmbitionBox’s own guidelines describe specific, checkable grounds — not a general fairness test. A rule breach is provable. “This isn’t fair” usually is not.
⚠️ The one sentence that changes most cases
Stop asking “is this review fair?” and start asking “which guideline does this review break?” Reviews come down on the second question. They almost never come down on the first.
What AmbitionBox removes
Guideline breaches
Content that fails automated moderation, discloses confidential company information, or was submitted without the account details AmbitionBox requires. This is the reliable route.
Integrity violations
Reviews established as fake, incentivised, coerced, or posted in breach of the multiple-review policy — more than one review per current employer inside six months, or more than one ever for a former employer.
Reviewer-initiated removal
AmbitionBox lets contributors edit or delete their own reviews. Where a reviewer can be reasonably approached through the platform’s own channels, an update or deletion request is sometimes the fastest route of all.
⚠️ Before You Do Anything: Moves That Create Risk
An AmbitionBox review is not a typical consumer complaint. The reviewer is a current or former employee, so the obvious instincts — contact them directly, have a lawyer send a letter, ask the team to post something positive — sit inside employment and consumer-protection territory that varies by jurisdiction. None of it is worth the risk relative to a properly built guideline report.
Contacting the reviewer directly
A request that sounds friendly to you can read as pressure to a regulator, a court, or the reviewer themselves — and it is the kind of contact that tends to surface later, quoted in full.
Sending a legal threat with no basis
A threat sent to intimidate rather than on a genuine, evidenced claim is the kind of conduct that creates exposure of its own, in most jurisdictions that regulate unfair commercial practice.
Pressuring staff for positive reviews
AmbitionBox’s guidelines prohibit incentivised or coerced reviews on the employer’s side too. Asking broadly and honestly is different from tying reviews to performance conversations or offering anything in exchange.
Leaning on an exit or confidentiality clause
Whether a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement is enforceable against a review is genuinely contested territory that varies by jurisdiction — and AmbitionBox will not remove a review simply because it breaches your private agreement.
Naming or guessing the reviewer publicly
Reviews on AmbitionBox are submitted with contributor details AmbitionBox holds privately. Guessing publicly risks accusing the wrong person, in writing, about something you cannot actually confirm.
Why this matters commercially, not just legally: every one of those moves is reversible only in theory. The safe route is also the effective one — build the case on the platform’s own guidelines and let the platform act.
✅ Which AmbitionBox Reviews Can Be Removed?
AmbitionBox publishes what it does not allow. Below are the grounds that actually decide cases, drawn directly from its community guidelines — not invented by any removal service, us included. In practice, a submission that identifies every applicable ground is stronger than one that argues a single point.
Fails automated moderation
Every submission is screened for abusive language, gibberish and spam patterns before it ever goes live. Content that should have failed this check but slipped through can still be reported against it.
Established as fake content
Where AmbitionBox can establish, with sufficient certainty, that a review didn’t come from a genuine employment experience, it is removable. This is the strongest ground when the reviewer never actually worked there.
Incentivised or coerced reviews
Reviews shown to have been monetarily or otherwise incentivised, or posted under coercion rather than as a genuine account, fall outside the guidelines regardless of which way they rate the company.
Confidential company information
Reviews that expose non-public internal information — source code, client lists, budgets, financial results, manufacturing or technical detail — are removable on that basis alone, independent of tone.
Missing required account details
Reviews submitted without the account information AmbitionBox requires to stand behind a contribution can be removed on that procedural ground.
Breach of the multiple-review policy
AmbitionBox limits contributors to one review per current employer every six months, and one review total for a former employer. Extra submissions beyond that are reportable as spam.
📊 AmbitionBox Removal Grounds at a Glance
| What the review does | Guideline breached | What proves it |
|---|---|---|
| Reads as gibberish, spam, or abusive language | Fails automated moderation | The review text itself — nothing else needed |
| Describes an employer the reviewer never worked for | Established as fake content | Records showing no employment match, presented as a documented search |
| Offers or admits payment or pressure behind the review | Incentivised or coerced reviews | Whatever evidences the incentive or coercion |
| Quotes source code, client lists, budgets or financials | Confidential company information | The named categories in the review, matched to your policy |
| Was posted without required account information | Missing required account details | AmbitionBox’s own account records |
| Is a second review from the same person inside the window | Multiple-review policy breach | Posting dates and the six-month / annual window |
🙅 What AmbitionBox Will Not Remove — No Matter How Unfair It Feels
This is the part most removal services skip, and it’s the part that saves an employer the most wasted effort.
A harsh but genuine account
“Worst management I’ve ever worked under” from someone who genuinely worked there is exactly the kind of personal opinion the guidelines are built to protect.
A factual disagreement
The reviewer says appraisals were delayed six months; HR’s records say four. AmbitionBox does not referee that kind of dispute between an employer and a former employee.
An old review
Age on its own is not a guideline breach. A review from years ago stays up until the guidelines are actually violated or the reviewer removes it themselves.
A review you find unfair or damaging
Commercial or reputational harm isn’t the test AmbitionBox applies. The question is always about the content against the guideline, not the consequence for the company.
🎯 Reporting reviews that plainly fall into these categories doesn’t help — AmbitionBox treats report abuse as a signal in its own right. Selectivity is a strategy, not caution.
👤 The Naming Rule: Why AmbitionBox Is the Opposite of Most Platforms
If you read one section on this page, make it this one. Most review platforms treat naming an individual as an automatic breach. AmbitionBox’s own guidelines say the opposite: reviews are allowed to name someone in any position at the company, current or former, as long as the review is describing that person’s behaviour or performance at work. 🧩
An account of a manager who “regularly missed one-to-ones and blocked a promotion” is ordinary, permitted content — it’s about workplace conduct, and the name alone changes nothing. What actually moves a case involving a named individual is one of the other grounds sitting alongside the name.
Who may be named
AmbitionBox’s threshold covers any role, current or former — there is no protected-executive carve-out the way there is on some other platforms. Naming, by itself, is not the breach.
What actually moves a case
Confidential information disclosed about that person, content that has tipped from describing conduct into something unrelated to work, or a review established as fake — the name is rarely the removable part on its own.
It applies to praise too
A glowing review naming a colleague is treated the same way as a critical one. This matters if you’re looking at a suspiciously positive review that reads like it was written internally.
Missing account details still count
If the review naming someone was also submitted without the account information AmbitionBox requires, that procedural ground stands on its own regardless of what the review says.
🔁 The Multiple-Review Rule, and What Counts as a Duplicate
AmbitionBox limits contributors to one review per current employer every six months, and one review in total for a former employer. That gives you a rule with a date stamp attached — where the same person has posted twice inside that window, the breach is visible on the profile rather than argued from your files.
⚠️ One thing to keep in mind
A reviewer editing or updating an earlier review, which AmbitionBox explicitly allows contributors to do, is not the same as posting a duplicate. Reporting a legitimate edit as a duplicate wastes a report and weakens your credibility for the ones that matter.
🛤️ Two Channels: Guideline Reports vs a Formal Grievance
A problem review has two possible routes, and they work very differently. ⏱️
🧭 The guideline route
What it is: reporting the review against the community guidelines, using the “Report” option on the review itself, or by writing to AmbitionBox’s support address with the details and proof.
Cost and speed: no formal complaint process required, and it’s the right first route for the large majority of cases.
⚖️ The formal grievance route
What it is: a separate, published grievance channel for genuinely unlawful content — defamation, exposure of protected personal data, or content a court has already ruled on.
Cost and speed: slower, and appropriate for a narrow set of cases where the content isn’t just unwelcome but unlawful and the authorship is identifiable.
🔑 The practical rule: exhaust the guideline route first. It costs nothing, it’s the process the platform itself points reviewers and employers toward, and most legitimate cases resolve there without ever needing a formal complaint.
⚙️ How AmbitionBox’s Moderation Actually Works
By AmbitionBox’s own account, content can move through up to three stages, and understanding them changes how a report should be written. 🧠
Technological moderation
Every submission is screened first by automated filters for abusive language, gibberish and spam signals. Most content is approved or rejected right here.
Human moderation
Where the automated pass can’t decide, or where a review has been reported, a human moderator reviews it against the guidelines directly.
Reported content
Anything flagged by a user or by the technological checks is routed back into human review for a final call.
The practical takeaway: a vague report rarely survives to a considered decision, because there’s nothing in it for a moderator to act on. A report that names the specific guideline and attaches the proof behind it is what actually gets read.
🔍 Why Reports Get Rejected — An Honest Look
It argued unfairness, not a guideline
The report explained why the review was hurtful or wrong, and never pointed at a specific community guideline. A moderator needs a rule to apply.
It asserted instead of showing
“This person never worked here” is a claim. A dated statement describing what was searched in the HR system and what it found is evidence.
It targeted the name, not the guideline
Reporting a review purely because it names a manager, without a guideline breach behind it, is very unlikely to succeed — naming is generally permitted.
It was a repeat of an earlier report
Reporting the same review again with no new information rarely changes the outcome, and can itself look like report abuse.
🕵️ Can You Find Out Who Wrote It — and Should You?
This is the question employers ask first, and it’s worth answering honestly rather than confidently.
What AmbitionBox does
AmbitionBox treats anonymity as a right it extends to contributors, and reviewer identity is not something it hands over to an employer on request.
Where that can change
Anonymity generally is not absolute against a valid legal process in the right jurisdiction, but that is a narrow, specialist route — not something a report or a support email will achieve.
“Toxic” is usually opinion
Strongly worded criticism — even harsh, even upsetting to read — is typically treated as opinion rather than a factual claim that can be tested or unmasked.
Our position
We don’t attempt to identify reviewers, and we’re sceptical of anyone who claims they routinely can. If a case genuinely needs legal process, that’s a matter for qualified counsel in the right jurisdiction, not a review-removal service.
⚖️ Taking Further Action: What We Won’t Pretend to Know
Some employers ask about suing over a review, or forcing disclosure of who wrote it. We are not lawyers, and the honest answer depends heavily on your jurisdiction, the exact wording of the review, and facts we can’t assess from here. What we can say generally: platforms that host reviews are typically treated differently in law from the people who write them, legal routes against an anonymous reviewer tend to be slow and become part of the public record themselves, and strongly worded opinion is usually harder to act on than employers expect. Where a review genuinely looks like it crosses into unlawful territory rather than unwelcome opinion, that’s a conversation for qualified counsel in your jurisdiction before it’s a conversation with us.
📉 What a Damaging AmbitionBox Review Actually Costs You
Employers tend to measure a bad review by how it feels to read. The real cost shows up somewhere else entirely — in the applicants who never apply and the offers that quietly get declined.
It’s read before the interview is
Most candidates check a company’s AmbitionBox page before they ever speak to a recruiter. A single detailed account of a bad experience is often the first real information they get.
Specific detail outweighs volume
One vivid paragraph about a difficult manager or a broken promise gets remembered where a dozen short, generic reviews get skimmed and forgotten.
It doesn’t expire on its own
Nothing about the passage of time removes a review. A three-year-old account of a bad exit sits on the page exactly as long as the reviewer leaves it there.
It taxes every hire you make
Every job posting, every referral programme, every recruiter outreach eventually sends a candidate to the same page — one that may be arguing against the offer before it’s made.
It lands on named employees
Reviews that describe a specific manager or team are read by that manager, by their colleagues, and by anyone who searches their name later.
It moves the number fast
A company profile can receive a modest number of reviews across a year, not thousands. There’s no burying anything under volume — and soliciting reviews to dilute a bad one is itself a guideline risk.
⏱️ Why waiting costs more: the case only gets harder to build with time. Employment records age out of easy reach, the people who could confirm what happened move on, and the review keeps being indexed and summarised the whole while. The best time to act on a guideline-breaching review is the day it appears.
Scale check: AmbitionBox now carries more than 8.5 million company reviews from over 15 million users. Moderation at that scale leans heavily on automated filters, which is exactly why a specific, guideline-anchored report matters so much once the automated pass has already looked at a review and left it standing.
🧠 AmbitionBox Reviews and AI Search
Something has changed in how candidates check employers, and it hasn’t been priced in yet. A candidate used to open your AmbitionBox page, scan the rating, read a spread of reviews, and weigh a bad one against the rest. Increasingly they ask an assistant instead — is this a good place to work? — and the assistant reads the profile on their behalf.
They never see your profile
Your rating and the balance of reviews are on the page the model read. Only its conclusion reaches the candidate.
The verdict has no star rating
An answer is a sentence, not a score. There’s no distribution of reviews to put one account in proportion.
Specific beats bland
A detailed account of a named problem is far more quotable than twenty reviews saying good culture. The sharpest negative is the line most likely to be repeated back.
It’s regenerated every time
Unlike a page view, the answer is produced fresh for each person who asks. One review can shape many impressions without anyone opening your profile once.
Removal at source is the only step that takes a review out of what a person reads and out of what a model can quote. It’s the reason acting on a guideline-breaching review early is worth more than it looks.
⚠️ The Risk Nobody Sells You: Getting Your Own Page Flagged
Review removal is usually discussed as though the only bad outcome is the review staying up. It isn’t. The worse outcome is enforcement action against the company’s own AmbitionBox page. 😬
Incentivising reviews
Offering anything — cash, perks, favourable treatment — in exchange for a review, positive or for removal of a negative one, is itself a guideline breach on the employer’s side.
Mass or false reporting
Reporting every negative review indiscriminately, or reporting content that plainly doesn’t breach any guideline, devalues future reports and can be treated as abuse of the report feature.
Unsupported legal notices
Filing a formal grievance or legal notice that can’t actually be stood behind creates exposure for whoever’s name is on it — not just for the platform.
Fake accounts posting on your behalf
If a vendor creates accounts to bury negative reviews under fabricated positive ones, the accounts may be theirs, but the consequences land on the company page.
⚠️ Ask this question of any provider, including us: “Do you create accounts, post reviews, or offer anything in exchange for a deletion, in my company’s name?” If the answer is anything other than a flat no, the service is putting the whole page at risk to deal with one review. Our answer is no.
🗂️ Situation Playbooks
Most employers arrive with a specific problem rather than a general one. These are the situations we see most, and what we would actually advise in each.
Someone who never worked here left a review
Worth raising — this is the strongest ground when it’s genuinely true. Build the case on employment records showing no match, not on the assertion alone.
The review names a manager
Naming, on its own, is not a breach on AmbitionBox. Look for what else is going on — confidential detail, content unrelated to work, or signs the review itself is fake.
It leaks salary bands or client names
Confidential company information is a named ground. Quote the passage, match it to the category, and keep the report specific.
The same person keeps posting
The multiple-review policy gives you an objective breach with dates attached, as long as it’s a genuine duplicate and not an edited update.
We think a competitor is behind it
Suspicion is not evidence. Look for what’s actually checkable — account signals, timing, or content that reads as fabricated — rather than reporting on a hunch.
Our rating just dropped
Deal with any genuinely removable reviews first, then focus on the response and the experience going forward. There’s no volume shortcut available, and chasing one usually creates the next problem.
It’s fair criticism and we know it
Then removal is the wrong tool, and we’ll tell you so. Improving the thing the review describes does more for future candidates than a takedown would.
🧭 Remove, Respond, or Leave It
Removal is one option among three, and often not the right one. A quick way to decide:
Remove
The review breaches a specific guideline — it’s established as fake, incentivised, leaks confidential material, is missing required details, or is a duplicate. The breach is visible in the text or the record.
Respond
The review is genuine criticism, harshly expressed but within the guidelines. A considered, non-defensive reply addressing the substance does more for a reading candidate than silence.
Leave it
The review is old, minor, and sits alongside plenty of better ones. Not every review needs an answer, and a profile where management only ever replies to the negative ones reads oddly.
🔎 What Removal Does and Does Not Fix
Worth being straight about this, because the alternative is a disappointed client three weeks later. Removal takes the review off your live AmbitionBox profile. It does not reach into search caches that haven’t refreshed, screenshots already circulating elsewhere, or material an AI system has already ingested. Those sources update as they update, and the visible effect arrives over time rather than instantly. What removal does achieve is decisive: it stops the review being served to anyone new, and it stops the counter running.
🤝 What We Actually Do — and What We Don’t
AmbitionBox’s own guidelines make clear that final decisions rest with AmbitionBox, not with any employer or third party. If you’ve found this page after running into that reality, good — you’re asking the right question.
What we do not have
No relationship with AmbitionBox. No contact who takes our calls. No ability to make a review disappear because we asked. Any firm suggesting otherwise is selling you something that doesn’t exist.
What we actually do
Read the review against the published guidelines, identify every ground it breaches, assemble what makes the breach checkable, and write a report a moderator can act on in one pass.
Why that is worth paying for
Not because it’s secret, but because it’s specific. Most employer reports fail on the same two mistakes — arguing fairness instead of citing a guideline, and submitting nothing that’s actually checkable.
What we will not do
Submit a report with no ground behind it. Contact your reviewer. Write your legal threats. Post reviews on your behalf, or arrange for anyone else to. Tell you a case exists when it doesn’t.
Some reviews come down quickly. Some are genuinely unremovable, and we’ll tell you which yours is before you commit to anything. A service that claims every review can be removed is either misunderstanding AmbitionBox’s guidelines or misrepresenting them.
🛠️ How We Handle an AmbitionBox Review — Our Actual Process
Four steps, in this order, every time. 🧭
Assessment before anything else
We read the review against AmbitionBox’s actual community guidelines and tell you honestly which ground applies, or that none does. Cases we don’t believe in, we decline.
Evidence built first
Employment-record checks, moderation references, and documentation of whatever the specific guideline requires — assembled before anything is submitted.
One report, one guideline, properly evidenced
A specific, cited guideline with the supporting file attached — not a scattergun of claims.
Outcome reported back in writing
Win or lose, you see exactly what happened and what, if anything, remains open.
🔐 What we never do: we don’t create accounts, post reviews, offer incentives for a deletion, or file a grievance we can’t stand behind. Every action we take is one an employer could take themselves, done with the evidence properly assembled.
Send us the review link and we will tell you where you stand. No obligation, and no case invented to win your business. If the review isn’t removable we’ll tell you that, and talk about the response instead.
📋 What to Prepare Before You Contact Anyone
-
✓
A full screenshot of the review, including any visible date and role/tenure details. -
✓
Whatever HR or employment records cover the person and period the review describes. -
✓
A note of anything in the review that looks like non-public company information. -
✓
The reference or outcome from any report you’ve already filed yourself, if you have one.
🏢 Who We Work With
AmbitionBox pressure concentrates wherever hiring is competitive and culture is part of the pitch. These are the teams that contact us most.
Technology and IT services
Candidates check AmbitionBox and forums as a matter of routine, and a single detailed review about management or workload carries disproportionate weight in a market where everyone is hiring from everyone.
Financial services
Graduate and analyst intakes read reviews closely, and the reputational exposure runs alongside the hiring one.
Healthcare and care providers
High-volume, high-turnover hiring where a rating drop translates directly into recruiting cost and unfilled shifts.
Retail, hospitality and logistics
Seasonal recruitment at scale, where a weak profile in the wrong month is the difference between a staffed peak and a scramble.
Agencies and consultancies
You sell your people. A profile that contradicts the pitch is a client-facing problem, not only a hiring one.
Startups and scale-ups
Rapid headcount growth, a founder-led culture story, and investors who will read the profile before the next round.
❓ AmbitionBox Review Removal — Frequently Asked Questions
Can any AmbitionBox review be removed?
No, and any provider telling you otherwise isn’t actually assessing your case. AmbitionBox removes content that breaks its published community guidelines. A genuine employee’s harsh opinion, or a review that simply hurts a rating, is not removable on those grounds — the useful question is always which specific guideline applies and whether it can be evidenced.
How long does AmbitionBox take to act on a report?
AmbitionBox doesn’t publish a fixed turnaround. Content is screened by automated filters first, and anything flagged or reported goes to human moderators from there. Treat any provider’s fixed-hours promise as a claim they can’t actually back.
Can a review that names my manager be removed just for that?
Not on its own. AmbitionBox’s guidelines explicitly allow reviews to name someone in any role, current or former, as long as the content describes that person’s behaviour or performance at work. A removal case needs a guideline breach alongside the name.
Does a review count if it names my manager?
Yes — AmbitionBox treats it as ordinary content, not a breach on its own. This is the opposite rule to several other review platforms, which is exactly why it trips up employers who’ve read advice written about a different site.
Can an anonymous review be removed?
Yes, where the reviewer’s account is missing information AmbitionBox requires, or where the content itself is established as fake, incentivised or coerced. Anonymity is a right AmbitionBox extends to contributors; it isn’t, on its own, a removal ground either way.
Can an employer find out who wrote an AmbitionBox review?
Not through AmbitionBox directly — anonymity is treated as a right it extends to contributors. Anonymity generally isn’t absolute against a valid legal process in the right jurisdiction, but that’s a narrow, specialist route, not something a report or support request achieves.
Can I take legal action over an AmbitionBox review?
That depends heavily on your jurisdiction and the exact content, and we aren’t lawyers. Strongly worded opinion is generally harder to act on than employers expect, and a legal route against an anonymous reviewer tends to be slow and become part of the public record itself. Where content genuinely looks unlawful rather than unwelcome, that’s a conversation for qualified local counsel.
What if the reviewer never actually worked at the company?
This is the strongest and most common ground — a review established as fake content is explicitly removable. The case is built from records showing no employment match for the details in the review, presented as a documented search rather than a bare denial.
Does reporting reviews put our own company page at risk?
Indiscriminate or unsupported reporting can be treated as abuse of the report feature and devalues future reports. The serious risk sits with incentivising reviews, creating fake accounts, or filing legal notices that can’t be supported — not with a single, well-evidenced report.
What’s the difference between reporting a review and a formal grievance?
A report asks AmbitionBox to enforce its own community guidelines and is the right first route for the large majority of cases. A formal grievance is a separate, published channel for genuinely unlawful content, handled independently and typically slower.
Can a removed review come back?
Content taken down after a considered moderation decision is generally settled. AmbitionBox’s own guidelines note the moderation process can’t guarantee catching every instance, so ongoing monitoring of a company page is worth doing regardless of any single outcome.
How many AmbitionBox reviews can one person leave?
AmbitionBox limits contributors to one review per current employer every six months, and one review in total for a former employer. A second review inside that window is a breach with dates attached — as long as it isn’t simply an edited update, which AmbitionBox permits.
Can I ask my team to post positive reviews?
You can ask broadly and honestly. You cannot offer any incentive, apply pressure, or coordinate submissions — incentivised or coerced reviews are removable on the employer’s side too, and can put your own page at risk.
Do you guarantee removal?
No. Nobody outside AmbitionBox controls its moderation decisions. We guarantee the quality of the assessment and the evidence behind a report — and we’ll tell you plainly when we don’t think a case is winnable, rather than take the work anyway.
What do you need from us to start?
A link to the review, a screenshot, and whatever employment or HR records cover the period the review describes. If you’ve already reported it yourself, send whatever reference or response you received — it usually tells us what’s already been considered.
🌐 Review Removal on Other Platforms
AmbitionBox is rarely the only place a reputation problem shows up. If the same episode has spread across the platforms your candidates and customers read, we handle those too.
Google Review Removal
Maps and Business Profile reviews that breach Google’s policies
Glassdoor Review Removal
Employer reviews that breach Glassdoor’s Community Guidelines
Trustpilot Review Removal
Customer reviews that breach the Guidelines for Reviewers
Airbnb Review Removal
Guest and host reviews under Airbnb’s content policy
Yelp Review Removal
Reviews that breach Yelp’s content guidelines
Tripadvisor Review Removal
Traveller reviews that breach Tripadvisor’s standards
Facebook Review Removal
Recommendations that breach Meta’s Community Standards
See all review removal platforms →
🚀 Ready to Deal With That Review?
Send us the review link and whatever records you already have. We’ll tell you honestly which guideline applies, whether we think it’s winnable, and what evidence the case needs — before you commit to anything.