The Write House

Taking Instructions for Litigation: Chronology of Pertinent Events

By Chinua Asuzu

When a client consults you to bring, continue, or defend a lawsuit at any level, you must (a) take detailed instructions; (b) ask probing questions; (c) clarify, interrogate, and resolve incoherencies and inconsistencies; (d) take pages of notes, and (e) plan and strategize well ahead.

Be ruthless in rooting out the truth about what happened. You need to find out as early as possible not only the strengths but also the weaknesses of the client’s case. Your interview (in some cases, an interrogation) of the client will involve both direct and cross-examination.

Ask clients to prepare and send you a chronology of pertinent events. You may do this in a face-to-face interview with the client or the client’s representative, or you may do it in your client-care letter. Get this report as soon as possible after receiving instructions. This report from the client should list, “day by day and time by time, every important occurrence bearing on the interactions between parties.” Having to prepare the timeline forces the client to review the pertinent interactions and transactions more minutely and hence “to understand precisely what has happened.” So it’s best for the client, rather than the attorney, to prepare this chronology. But if the client is illiterate, then conduct a close interview that enables you to prepare the report yourself.

This chronological report helps you “fit events together as if they were pieces of a puzzle. … It’s a crucial step in case preparation.” When dealing with corporate clients, encourage them to convene a meeting or set up a task force to prepare this report. Members will remind one another of the relevant events. The chronology of pertinent events can be the most crucial preparatory step for writing your brief’s fact section. Give it time. Ask questions to amplify its contents. You’ll get not only details but also a sense of the story and an impression about the equities. You’ll see clearer where your client’s edge lies, strategically or otherwise.

The chronology of pertinent events will also serve to feed affidavits, depositions, and pleadings. It should be a comprehensive account and one of the first contents of the file. The chronology of pertinent events is also useful outside the dispute-resolution context, especially in drafting demand letters.

The planning stage of a lawsuit requires you to perform three critical tasks: (1) formulate a thesis for the case, (2) build a theory of the case boosted by a theme, and (3) inject priming devices from the outset and throughout the litigation. But more of this anon.