Using Tabular Review to Build a Case Chronology

A case chronology usually means combing through pleadings, correspondence, and discovery by hand to figure out what happened and when. NetDocuments tabular review can pull the who, what, and when out of every document in a case file at once, giving you a sortable timeline with every event linked back to the passage it came from.

Follow the steps below to create your first chronology table on a live matter, so by the end you have a working, source-linked timeline instead of a legal pad full of dates.

Build your first chronology table

Open tabular review and load your documents

Open the Legal AI Assistant, click the menu icon, and toggle to Tables, tabular review lives inside the Assistant, not a separate app. Then drag your pleadings, correspondence, and discovery documents (.docx, .pdf, .pptx, or NetDocuments emails) into the table view and confirm the document list before moving on.

Build your columns with AI

Select “Create Columns with AI” and describe the field you want in one sentence, including the format you want back, a date, a dollar figure, a short quote, a yes or no. Review the proposed columns, then edit, remove, or add to them before running.

Run it and read the results

Select “Run”, larger document sets process in the background so you can leave and come back to a finished table. Click any cell to open its source citation, check the date and event against the actual document, and export the finished table to Excel when it's ready to share.