Show each party's side in swimlanes

Who did what, and when, is often the heart of the case. Give each party its own lane on the timeline (the claimant, the respondent, the court) and the chronology shows it at a glance: the claimant's letters stacking up while the respondent's lane stays empty, or the court's directions landing between the parties' steps.

Swimlanes belong to the relative view, where every event sits at its real date. Two questions decide how you set them up. What divides the facts in this case? Usually the parties, sometimes workstreams, entities in a group or jurisdictions. Are the events already tagged or saved as stories? If they are, each lane fills in one step.

Add the lanes

1. Open the timeline and choose Relative in the view switcher in the toolbar.

2. Click Add swimlane in the toolbar on the left. The new lane appears above the date line, numbered and in a colour of its own. To add a lane below the line instead, right-click an empty part of the timeline below the line and choose Add swimlane.

   

3. Hover the lane's title and click Edit. Give the lane a Name ("Claimant", "Respondent", "Court") and pick its Colour. The slider for transparency in the colour picker decides how strongly the lane shows: a pale lane keeps the events easy to read, a stronger one makes the parties easy to tell apart on a projector.

   

4. Under Title position, choose whether the name sits at the top, the middle or the bottom of the lane, and set its Size. Turn on Show full title if a long name is cut short.

Fill a lane in one step

If the events are already tagged by party, or you have a story for each party, there is no need to place them one at a time.

• By tag. In the lane's Edit panel, choose the party's tag under Tag. Every event with that tag moves into the lane, and a lane that still has its number for a name takes the tag's name. When more events have been tagged since, hover the lane and click Add by tag to bring them in too.
• By story. Select the party's story in the story tabs under the toolbar, then hover the lane and click Add by story: every event in the story moves into the lane. With All events showing, Add by story lets you choose which story to take.

If some of the tagged events also carry the tag of another lane, Juristic asks before moving them (Swimlane Tagging Conflict). Click Confirm to move them into this lane, or Cancel to leave the lane and the events as they were.

Place single events

1. Hover the event and click Placement.

2. Pick the lane in the Select Swimlane field. The list shows each lane with whether it sits above or below the date line.

   Clear the field to take the event out of the lane again. Without a lane, Auto, Above and Below decide which side of the date line the event sits on.

Arrange the lanes

• Hover a lane's title and use Move up and Move down to change the order of the lanes on that side of the line.
• Move below and Move above put the lane on the other side of the date line. With the claimant's lanes above the line and the respondent's below, the two sides face each other across the dates.
• Delete removes the lane for everyone on the timeline, once you confirm. The events in it are kept and leave the lane.

Tips from practice

• Tag first, lanes second. Tagging each event with its party pays off twice: the lane fills from the tag, and the same tag filters the chronology for a story or an export.
• Give the court or tribunal a lane of its own. Directions, hearings and deadlines read best apart from what the parties did, and the lane shows at once whether a party acted before or after the court's order.
• Lanes print as you see them. A relative timeline exports to PDF as one page, with the lanes and colours as they are on screen. Set Empty swimlanes to Remove in the export to leave out lanes with none of the chosen events, so the rest prints larger.

Not tagged yet? Start with tag events by issue. To put the lanes in front of the client, see make a one-page overview of the dispute.