Introducing Fact Management: A New Architecture for Case Strategy
When a new case begins, litigators have to quickly get a sense of the key players, rough chronology, and core allegations to start forming their strategy. But then, the waiting game begins. You’re stuck waiting for documents to be collected, processed, and batched for review before you can get into the real details of the case.
Once the documents finally arrive, however, you face a new structural barrier: your strategy and your evidence often exist in two completely different worlds. While the evidence resides in a review platform, your evolving narrative can be captured in static, disconnected tools like Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Attempting to connect them requires a manual, high-risk cycle of exporting, copy-pasting, and verifying Bates numbers.
Everlaw’s new Fact Management tool bridges this divide by unifying your discovery and case strategy in a single platform, allowing you to start building your winning argument from the first moments of your case. It transforms Everlaw’s Storybuilder feature into the backbone of your case narrative, allowing you to frame your story before you’ve even reviewed a single document.
What Is Fact Management?
Fact Management exists within Everlaw’s Storybuilder tool as a way to lay out the facts of your case so you can establish key timelines and events before you receive any documents, and begin framing your narrative almost immediately.
Instead of treating a case as a flat, overwhelming list of documents, Fact Management allows you to organize your case around specific events or allegations.
By creating distinct timelines to isolate specific narratives—like a key witness or a core issue—you can quickly gain clarity in your case. You can also validate broader strategy by consolidating your facts into a single master view, allowing you to instantly spot how individual facts intersect, contradict, or leave gaps in the big picture.
Additionally, since Fact Management exists within the shared workspace of Storybuilder, your entire team—from associates reviewing documents to partners drafting motions—can operate from a single source of truth. You can capture known facts immediately and establish a chronology that drives your review, rather than waiting for the review to reveal the timeline.
Fact Management Features
Everlaw’s unified workflow means you never have to leave the platform, so your team can be supported for the entire lifecycle of your case strategy—from the initial client interview to the final argument.
Fact-First Architecture
When you’re going through the ediscovery process, the narrative of your case doesn't always align perfectly with timestamped emails or PDFs.
Everlaw’s Fact Management utilizes a fact-first architecture that allows you to create facts independently of documents. It supports dateless entries and fuzzy dates to match real-world complexity, which is essential for the early stages of a case where details are murky.
For instance, if you are aware of a handshake agreement that occurred sometime last summer, you shouldn't be prevented from logging that pivotal moment just because you lack a specific date or file. With a fact-first architecture, you can create a fact in Storybuilder and upload the associate supporting documents to help frame your narrative using approximate dates, ensuring your timeline reflects the truth of the event rather than just the limitations of your metadata.
Curated Timelines
As a case grows, a single chronological list of every event can become unmanageable. When you’re dealing with thousands of facts across multiple years, a flat list provides data, but not clarity.
Fact Management allows you to master case complexity through curated timelines to isolate specific data subsets, such as a key witness or specific legal issue.
For example, if you’re trying to pinpoint inconsistencies in a fraud case, you can create a timeline that’s specific to the CFO’s communications and a separate one for board meetings. And when you need the big picture, you can leverage Fact Management’s "View All Facts" master list, which allows you to aggregate all entries to inspect the complete case record in a single view, making it effortless to spot exactly where those individual timelines intersect, contradict, or leave gaps.
End-to-End Integration
The most persistent pain point in litigation workflows is the "copy-paste” chaos. Attorneys often find a critical document in the review platform, download it, and then paste the text into a Word document to build a deposition outline. If the document is re-produced or the coding changes, the external document is instantly outdated.
Fact Management solves this through end-to-end integration within the Everlaw platform, ensuring that your strategy is woven into every work product you create. And since you’re able to remain in Everlaw for your entire case process, your data is kept in a secure environment rather than split between disparate tools.
This integration transforms the deposition preparation process. When you uncover a hot document in the Review Window, you can instantly turn that finding into a fact without switching tabs. Later, when you are building your outline in the Depositions tool, that fact—and its link to the live evidence—is ready to be pulled in naturally. You avoid repeating work and ensure that your team is always operating from a single source of truth, rather than relying on static exports that go stale the moment they are saved.
Unifying Your Case Strategy
For too long, litigation strategy has been fragmented across disconnected tools, forcing legal teams to work in silos and miss connections.
With Fact Management, you can unite your discovery and your case strategy, empowering you to stop letting documents dictate your process. Instead, you can build your story on facts and master the complexity of your case with curated timelines.
