Extract from Scott Upchurch’s article “How to Build Fact-Based Legal Timelines”
Before coming to DISCO, I created and used legal timelines many times in the 15 years I practiced litigation. Even so, while consulting with our customers to develop DISCO’s Timelines feature, I learned a lot about how legal professionals around the world create and use their chronologies or timelines.
This article focuses on one aspect of how I believe legal timelines can be most efficiently organized: around facts, as opposed to documents.
But first, let’s discuss the importance of timelines and how they’re often used.
What I mean by “timelines”
“Timelines,” in this article, refers to the chronological listing of relevant facts and allegations (or events).
Some, including myself when I practiced, refer to that as a legal “chronology,” reserving “timelines” for the visual or graphical representation of events. However, we learned from our customers that the terms are often used interchangeably.
To that end, we chose “Timelines” to refer to our feature, and – spoiler alert! – leave open the possibility for a future visual representation of that data.
Legal timelines: When to use them
It is virtually impossible to overemphasize the importance of facts and evidence in the practice of law.
As we developed DISCO’s Timelines feature, our team analyzed the various ways a legal timeline might be used throughout the litigation process.
