Facts, Issues, and People

The Nextpoint Litigation Suite offers you the ability to build your case story by linking the Facts, People and Issues to the various pieces of document evidence in your case directly in the app. When you assign dates to the facts, you can also view your case story in chronology format. This allows users to quickly and easily filter aspects of the story by a date range, the specific individuals, or the issues involved in the case for deposition and trial prep.

• Facts can be used to underscore the anatomy of a dispute, including important events, legal claims and defenses of each party.
• Issues are those vital questions of law on which the court must rule.
• People are important individuals or organizations in a matter.

Tagging Exhibits in the Document View

1. While viewing a document, expand the “Case Connections” tab on the right.
2. Select the “Facts”, “Issues”, or “People” section to add or create a new item for this document. You can also remove a fact, issue, or person by clicking on the red circle  next to an item. Clicking on a selected item at the document level will also allow you to edit that Fact/Issue/Person. 
3. Expand the drop down and select the item you would like to add to this document, or advanced users can select “Create New” to add a new item to this list directly from the Document View.

You can add any additional facts, issues, or people to each document as you review. 

Key Documents

Nextpoint's "Key Documents" field appears at the top of each database's "Hot Fields" section by default and is a way for users to flag and identify important documents for later use. Simply click on the checkbox to tag a document and be sure to save your update. 

To code multiple documents as "Key Documents" at once, select them from your grid view, and bulk code them under the "Fields" section. 

Searching on Facts, Issues, and People 

To search for facts, issues, or people in your database, type in the name of the field, a colon, and the value in quotation marks. The following examples would work as searches in your litigation database:

fact:"Enron admits to overstating 600M in profits since 1997"

issue:"Fraud"

people:"John Smith"

person:"John Smith"

You may also run searches for specific terms within each set (e.g. facts:"Enron") to identify facts, issues, or people that contain specific terms. Additionally, to search for "people" you can search on either "person:" or "people:" as seen in the examples above. 

If you want to search for different case connection items within the same document with an "AND" search:

issue:"Fraud" AND person:"John Smith"

Facts, Issues, and People are also available in the "More Tools" section of the advanced search tool. 

Overlaying Facts, Issues, and People 

You can overlay Facts, Issues, or People onto specific documents in your database, just like you can overlay other fields. Add a key field like Nextpoint or Bates Start, and then columns for your facts, issues, or people. You can apply existing facts, issues, or people or you can create new ones directly from the overlay. When mapping your fields during your overlay, select the field title "Facts", "Issues", or "People" and run the overlay.

Currently, you cannot add dates, descriptions, or other facts, issues, or people properties while running an overlay. To edit these properties, click into the fact, issue, or person you created (see #5 in this article) and manually apply the additional information. 

Next up - The Litigation Chronology Tab