Debora Verdier serves as the senior partner at Cavanagh Law in a variety of labor and employment disputes. She’s also a part-time faculty member at Arizona State University, where she teaches a practical skills course called "The Litigation Experience."

“I’m an employment lawyer and my cases require a very careful review of the detailed events that took place leading up to the complaint because of the concept of retaliation,” Debora said. “It’s essential to have a precise timeline of when the complaint occurred and what happened that followed that complaint. In any commercial or civil case that is document-intensive, having a timeline is critical to seeing the big picture. This is also what I tell my students.”

In this case study, learn firsthand how innovative attorneys like Debora leverage Casefleet to put together a full fact chronology to build winning cases. 

Creating fact chronologies with essential elements

“Compiling detailed fact chronologies has always been a very important part of my practice. I've been a long-time user of fact chrons,” Debora said. “Before I had access to Casefleet, I was just doing them in a table in Word and putting them together.”

Debora shared how she discovered Casefleet. After seeing how the technology could manage a lot of the chronology work during her free trial, she realized this was just the tool for the job. She has now shared the tool with others in her firm who are also using it with success.

Casefleet allows Debora to automatically create a fact chronology by compiling all the essential elements for a case — dates, times, witnesses, issues, evidence — and keeping it all in one place so anyone working on the case can access it in the cloud.

“I don't think you should be reviewing a document and not create a fact chronology at the same time,” Debora explained, sharing that where Casefleet really made a difference was the ability to create the fact chronology automatically during document review.

“It gives you a deliverable to give to your clients. Being able to review the documents, and then be able to say to the clients, ‘I have done this in preparation for your deposition, here's a list of documents and facts that I want you to review.’ I can automatically send the client a .zip file that has the fact chron as it relates to just them as a witness so they don't have to read everything with all the attached documents,” Debora said.

As a best practice, especially when dealing with hundreds of pages in .pdfs, Debora said she has those documents Bates labeled and “electronically slip-sheeted” before sending them to Casefleet for review and preparation of the chron.

“I use Casefleet to identify which documents I want for a deposition,” Debora explained, “and then I send that list ​to my assistant who then prepares the binders and builds our exhibit list for that case using Casefleet. That has worked out really well.” 

How Casefleet compares to other document solutions

In addition to using Casefleet for document review, Debora said that she also uses Relativity but has “weaned” her reliance on the platform since “it is very expensive.”

“Casefleet has made it so I don’t have to use Relativity as much,” she shared. “I used to have to put documents into Relativity, which you have to pay to host just to identify what to produce, whereas if it's a smaller volume of documents, I now use Casefleet. I just create issue codes to note what’s part of the production, and send to my assistant to Bates number them.”

“That's where Casefleet has helped out. Relativity is great if you have a case that has tens of thousands of documents. It's really more of a document database tool. Whereas many of my cases might have a couple hundred documents. I don't really need Relativity for those — Casefleet is perfect for that.”

Using Casefleet for case assessment and evaluation

Debora shared that one of the other ways she leverages Casefleet is the case assessment. “Because I'm always on the defense side, I use Casefleet for creating the initial case evaluation - what you'd call an early case assessment. To prepare for that, I review all the documents to create a fact chron and then summarize those facts in a narrative form. To be able to attach the background documentation, I think, really gives the client a sense of the value they're getting from my work.”

Where Casefleet makes a difference

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, Debora had to take time away in the midst of preparing for a big case. “I had a compressed deposition schedule that I had to prepare for with everything happening in July. I deposed multiple plaintiffs in different cases within days of each other, and it was a really difficult time,” she shared. “But Casefleet really helped me out because I didn't have time to do my normal ‘hit by a bus outline.’

“When I say ‘hit by a bus outline’, I identify a document by the Bates range, the date of it, what it is, and then I'll ‘snip’ certain sections from that document into my outline, and then I drop questions from it into that outline. Casefleet helped me to do that by basically tagging documents that I wanted to cover with a particular plaintiff.

“I sent a report of those issues with the attachments to a folder and had my assistant print all the exhibits. Then I just used my fact chron to ask my deposition questions. It wasn't ideal but it was a really nice workaround.” 

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