Pull the events out of one key document

Some documents carry much of the story on their own: the judgment under appeal, the expert report, a long witness statement. Rather than reading it with a pen and typing up every date, you let JuristIQ propose the events, check each one against the page, and put the ones that stand on the chronology.

One question decides where they go. Does the dispute already have a chronology? If it does, add the events to it, so they sit among the rest. If this document is where the work starts, build a new timeline from it.

Run Create Timeline on the document

1. Open the document in the Document tool, from the sidebar or with OCR in the toolbar of a document you are viewing. The tools panel on the right lists what you can do with it.

   

2. If the document is a scan, run OCR first: choose the document's language under Select Language and start the scan. A scanned page without a text layer gives JuristIQ nothing to read, and the import finds no events.

3. Click Create Timeline in the tools panel.

4. Under Extra instructions, tell JuristIQ what matters in this document, if anything. "Only the procedural steps, not the background facts" keeps a judgment's events to what happened in the proceedings. The field offers the instructions you have used before.

   

5. Choose where the events go:

   • To add them to the case chronology, pick it under Select Timeline and click Create in Timeline. The list shows the timelines you can open, grouped by client and matter.
   • To start a new timeline from this document, click Create new Timeline. It is saved in your drafts, named Timeline with today's date and time, until you file it into the matter (File drafts into the right matter).

   Juristic opens the timeline while JuristIQ reads the document, and progress shows at the bottom of the timeline. A timeline kept in a client group rather than a matter does not open by itself: open it from the group.

Review the proposed events

Nothing goes on the chronology until you accept it.

1. When the document has been read, a button with a count appears in the toolbar on the left of the timeline: documents await your attention. Click it to open the review.
2. The document opens beside the events JuristIQ found, each with its source highlighted on the page. Check each event against the page and click Accept, Edit it first, or remove it. Events marked Low confidence need a closer look: the date, or what it refers to, was not clear on the page.
3. If JuristIQ missed a date, select the text in the document and click Add event, or use Mark a date to draw a box around a date on a scanned page.
4. Accept all events accepts the rest in one go, leaving out the low-confidence ones. When every event is accepted or removed, click Finish review.

If JuristIQ found no events at all, a second button appears in the same toolbar to decide how to handle the document. Handle documents the import could not read explains the choices.

Place the events in the chronology

The accepted events appear on the timeline at their dates, each linked to the document as its source. Read them in context: a date in the judgment may duplicate an event you already have from the correspondence, or describe it differently. Remove the duplicate or correct the wording now, while the document is fresh in your mind; Check and correct the chronology in a table is the quickest way to go through them.

Which choice for which document

Tips from practice

• See one document's events on their own. In Filter events on the timeline, filter by Documents and pick the document: every event it produced is linked to it.
• Accept what the document says, not what you know. If the witness gets a date wrong, keep the event as the document puts it and note the conflict. That inconsistency may be the point.
• Several documents at once? Import them into the timeline instead: Build the chronology from the case documents.