A township does not need to hire a forensic expert to recreate deleted phone records to satisfy a right-to-know request, the Commonwealth Court has ruled.

On Feb. 5, a unanimous three-judge panel of the court in Paint Township v. Clark overturned a trial court's decision, which had ordered the town to attempt to recreate data that was deleted from a phone that had been used by the chairman of the township's board of supervisors.

Judge Patricia A. McCullough, who wrote the panel's precedential opinion, said that not only was there not enough evidence to support the notion that the deleted data had not been completely removed from the phone, but the process of piecing the phone records back together would create a document that was not available at the time the request was made.