Rule 1007 Testimony or Statement of a Party to Prove Content

If you want to prove what a document, recording, or photo says, and the other side is the one you're offering this evidence against, you can simply use their own testimony, deposition, or written statement to prove it. You don't need to track down the original document itself.

This makes things easier in a specific situation: when the person you're up against in the case has already talked about the contents of a writing, recording, or photo, whether through testimony in court, statements made during a deposition, or something they wrote down. Since they're the one who made these statements, you can use their own words against them to establish what the original item contained.

The key benefit here is that you skip the usual requirement of producing the original document or explaining why you don't have it. Normally, if you want to prove what's in a writing or recording, you need the actual original or a good reason why it's not available. But this rule creates a shortcut when the other party's own statements can establish the content, since it makes sense to hold them to what they already said.