How to Build a Case Chronology With AI

The working kit

Enter your email to get the complete working kit and receive a link to the download page. It includes an Excel chronology workbook, copyable TXT prompts, an editable Word handoff template and the fictional worked example.

Use the workbook to track events, source coverage, questions and changes. The TXT prompts include input placeholders for extraction, reconciliation and update review. The Word handoff has editable tables for coverage, uncertainties, changes and next actions. Use your platform’s processing report where it already records coverage; do not maintain a duplicate log by hand.

1. Define the scope and confirm the source set

Write a short scope before uploading material: the factual questions, relevant issues and participants, intended audience, date range and review cut-off. In a supply dispute, ask when a notice was attempted, acknowledged and stated to take effect. Do not start with “find every date”, or define relevance only by the account you hope to prove.

Confirm that the tool and the intended use are approved for this matter. Check confidentiality, retention, training, access and applicable restrictions before providing client material. The jurisdiction notes below identify some requirements that need separate checking.

Collection access is not a coverage report

Claude’s Projects documentation explains that, in retrieval mode, it searches for relevant information rather than loading the whole project into memory at once. That describes one retrieval workflow, not a limitation of every product. The practical inference is narrower: the ability to access a collection does not prove that a particular answer has reviewed every document in it. 1

Ask what your selected operation actually does: searches for relevant passages, processes an explicit selection, or runs a document-by-document job. For a systematic chronology, retain the selection and processing results. A model saying “all documents reviewed” is not an independent ingestion audit.

Document processing can extract text and metadata, identify duplicates and preserve relationships between messages and attachments. Everlaw describes those preparation functions separately from deciding what the evidence establishes. 3

Keep stable source IDs and the original files. Check scans against the page image where a material date or passage is unclear. Retain email headers and attachment relationships. Record missing, failed, password-protected and partial files as exceptions, not as reviewed material.

For each batch, record what was expected, what the system processed and what remains outstanding. “No events identified” and “not processed” are different outcomes. The Source coverage sheet makes that distinction explicit.

2. Test a representative batch before expanding

Choose a manageable pilot that contains the kinds of material likely to cause trouble: a long email chain, an attachment, an unclear scan, an ambiguous date and competing accounts. Review it manually first and record the material events and questions you expect the process to preserve.

Run the extraction instruction against that batch. Compare both directions: whether each candidate is supported, and whether important events in the sources were missed. Keep the actual output and corrections; a polished final chronology alone hides where the process failed.

Use the pilot to choose a workable batch size and output format. Do not adopt an arbitrary number of files: a short email and a long report create different review demands. Keep related messages and attachments together, track overlap between batches, and reduce the batch when output is truncated or pinpoints become unreliable.

Expand only when you can retrieve the cited material, explain omissions and account for unfinished processing. Re-test after a material change to the tool, prompt or source format. Passing a small pilot is not proof of complete extraction from a large matter.

ABA Formal Opinion 512 makes the appropriate degree of independent review dependent on the tool and task. Its smaller-subset example concerns contract summaries; it does not establish a universal sampling percentage or certify a chronology as complete. 2

3. Extract events into a consistent register

Ask for a table of candidates, not a finished narrative. Capture the supporting passage and pinpoint at extraction time. Keep four kinds of information separate:

• Identity and timing: a candidate ID, the date as written, any unambiguous sort date, and date precision. Preserve the original time zone alongside a conversion.
• Proposition: one checkable statement about an event or an attributed account, with participants. Keep allegations, recollections and intended dates labelled.
• Support: source ID, page/paragraph/message pinpoint and a short supporting passage. Multiple sources can support one event.
• Review: source-support state, factual position, owner and unresolved question. Do not collapse them into a single confidence score.

In the workbook, “Checked against source” records a review action. “Disputed” records a factual position. Both can be true for the same entry. Leave an unsupported normalized date blank rather than using a placeholder that makes the event appear precisely dated.

Supply the scope, batch ID, expected document IDs and the actual source material with this instruction. The example request in the kit shows the complete input. Save output in a candidate copy first; do not overwrite the reviewed register.

4. Reconcile without flattening the evidence

A single document may describe several events. Several documents may describe one event. Reconciliation is deciding which is which, not merely deleting similar-looking rows.

Merge genuine duplicates while retaining every source reference. A duplicate export is not independent corroboration. Keep separate sending attempts separate. Do not combine sending, an acknowledgment and a stated effective date into “the agreement terminated”.

Treat document dates as provenance unless their timing is itself material. A note made on 20 March can contain a recollection of 13 March; those dates serve different purposes. Keep later recollections attributed, and show conflicting accounts without selecting the tidiest version.

The candidate-to-event mapping is the handoff between extraction and review. Each candidate should have an Event ID, a note location or an explained exclusion. Assign stable Event IDs once; reordering or a wording correction should not create a new identity.

5. Review support, coverage and interpretation separately

Source support: does the passage support the wording?

Open the cited record, including surrounding context. Check actors, date, quotation and qualifications. Correct “Apex received the notice” to an attributed statement when the record only says that someone reported receipt. A citation to a related topic is not support for the precise proposition.

Coverage: what might be absent?

Compare important source documents against the register. Check missing attachments, extraction failures, sources that produced no events and unexplained periods. Review adverse material as well as helpful material. A perfectly cited chronology can still omit the document that changes the case.

Interpretation: what can you conclude?

Separately assess materiality, competing evidence, credibility and legal significance. A source check does not decide those questions. Do not ask the same AI to certify its own answer and call that independent verification.

Prioritise consequential notices, transactions, deadlines, contradictions, inferred dates and entries already used in drafting. Broader checks should look for recurring extraction problems and omissions. Choose and document review depth for the task and intended use; this guide supplies no “safe” percentage.

Return a visible queue of questions with owners and next actions. It is more useful to say “delivery record missing; associate to obtain it” than to place an unexplained confidence percentage beside an asserted receipt date.

Worked example: from candidates to reviewed entries

The kit contains six initial fictional text documents and identifies one missing attachment. The material includes a notice, a sent email, a duplicate export, an acknowledgment, a later recollection and an ambiguous meeting note. The source IDs and line numbers were authored for this exercise, not taken from a real matter.

• Date: 14 March 2024, 23:50 -0700
• Event: Northline attempted to email the notice.
• Source: EMAIL-014, p.1 l.1-6; COPY-014, p.1 l.1-6.
• Review note: A sent-folder export does not establish delivery. The original recipient is written [email protected].

What the AI actually returned

We recorded a text-only sequence in Codex CLI 0.160.1 using the requested model identifier gpt-6.1-sol at low reasoning effort on 7 October 2026 (Sydney). There was one successful completion per stage. Extraction returned nine candidates; reconciliation proposed eight event rows. The complete inputs, unchanged final outputs, settings and checksums are in the kit.

The model correctly retained the original time-zone offset and converted 23:50 -0700 to 06:50 UTC the next day. It identified the duplicate message, left 04/05/2024 ambiguous, attributed the later recollection and did not present 31 March as a finding that termination was valid. Those are useful results, not errors to invent for a demonstration.

The complete working kit includes the exact extraction and reconciliation inputs and outputs, plus checksums and the run manifest for anyone who wants to audit the demonstration.

What the editorial review changed

For the stated scope, we retained five working entries: the original sending attempt, Casey’s acknowledgment statement, Morgan’s recollection, the intended end date and the ambiguous meeting note. Document-creation dates and attachment names moved into source/review notes where they did not need separate event rows. The mapping accounts for all nine candidates.

One entry before and after review

Source: ACK-015, p.1 l.1-5. Sort key: the acknowledgment message timestamp, 15 March 2024 at 16:30 UTC. Review note: the actual receipt time and the Message-ID being acknowledged are unknown. This is a deliberate choice about what the row represents, not correction of a fabricated receipt claim.

The acknowledgment entry uses the message’s 16:30 timestamp to place the communication. It preserves “received a notice today” as Casey’s statement, rather than turning 16:30 into a receipt time. The missing service attachment stays open. Morgan’s account is retained without silently selecting a year or resolving the conflict.

These are AI-assisted editorial decisions about a teaching example, not independent lawyer validation. This run did not test PDF ingestion, OCR, retrieval across thousands of files, or Grella’s performance. We make no accuracy, completeness or time-saving claim from it.

6. Update the register instead of replacing it

The second batch contains a failure notification for the original Message-ID and a later resend to a different address. This is where a maintained chronology is more useful than another freshly generated narrative.

In the recorded update run, the model proposed changes without accepting them. It linked the failure report to the original attempt and proposed separate failure-notification and resend events. It kept the possible link between the resend and Casey’s acknowledgment unconfirmed.

The recorded update input and output are included in the complete working kit so the demonstration can be checked against the fictional source pack.

The completed example keeps E02 and its reviewer note, adding the failure report as a source. It adds E09 for the notification and E10 for the resend. E04 still reports Casey’s acknowledgment. The later resend precedes that acknowledgment by 35 minutes, but timing alone does not establish which message was acknowledged.

E06’s recollection, E07’s stated intended end date and E08’s ambiguous date are not overwritten. The register now has seven entries, with unresolved items still visible. The change log records the accepted editorial additions and leaves the unconfirmed receipt inference marked for review.

On a real matter, record the old wording, proposed wording, source, decision and reviewer. Recheck summaries, witness-preparation notes or drafts that relied on a materially changed entry. Do not silently replace a reviewer’s correction because a new model run produced different wording.

7. Hand over something a partner can review

Send the register with a short account of scope, outstanding material, significant uncertainties and changes. A long chronology without that context transfers the investigation back to the reviewer.

Use the handoff template to name owners, cut-offs and next actions. Produce a task-specific view from the maintained register, with a version and cut-off, rather than editing another independent copy. Before serving, filing or supplying material to a witness, check the applicable rules and remove commentary that does not belong in that version.

Evaluate the whole task, not just generation

Have an associate use the fictional pack without seeing the saved output first, and ask a supervising lawyer to review the handoff. Record preparation, checking, correction, reconciliation and update time separately. Note unsupported entries and omissions. This is a proposed team exercise; we have not claimed customer validation or measured time savings.

Jurisdiction and confidentiality checks

The workflow above is a suggested internal process. It does not establish permission to upload particular material or satisfy filing requirements. Read the current rules, orders and professional obligations applicable to the matter before use.

United States: ABA Formal Opinion 512 addresses competence, independent review and confidentiality under the ABA Model Rules. It does not replace state-specific professional rules or court directions. Tool approval and a successful pilot do not remove the lawyer’s responsibility. 2

New South Wales: SC Gen 23 paragraph 9B expressly permits chronology generation subject to paragraph 9A’s conditions for protected material. Separate restrictions govern witness/evidentiary content and verification of submissions. Do not treat permission to prepare an internal chronology as permission to generate witness evidence or an exhibit. 4

Federal Court of Australia: GPN-AI, dated 16 April 2026, expects the responsible person to confirm chronology accuracy where AI has helped prepare court documents. It also addresses disclosure, including AI analysis relied on by witnesses, and restrictions on confidential or compelled material. A closed tool does not remove restrictions on later use. 5

England and Wales: Appendix 6 of the Commercial Court Guide addresses concise, neutral, source-referenced chronologies and the handling of disagreement. These are court-specific directions, not a universal template for every internal chronology. 6

How Grella supports the workflow

Grella’s chronology workflow starts from dated facts and their sources. Use the master chronology for the broader record, a focused chronology for a particular question, and the linked document/page to check an entry. When new material arrives, use Change Review to inspect what needs another look. A focused view does not replace the master record.

The fictional model run above is separate from Grella and is not evidence of Grella’s accuracy or speed. The same review questions apply: what was processed, what supports this entry and what remains unresolved?

Explore Grella’s chronology workflow