For Corporate Attorneys ·
What you'll accomplish
A hold or an internal investigation lands on your desk with a folder of emails, meeting notes and policy acknowledgments. Building the chronology by hand means reading everything once to find the dates and again to put them in order. You will upload abstracted copies to a regular Claude chat and ask for a dated event table, with the source document and page for every row and the word "unclear" wherever a date is uncertain. The result is a draft chronology for you and, where the matter needs it, outside counsel. It is a draft to check, row by row.
This guide uses a regular chat with file uploads. It does not use a Project, so nothing stays behind in a project knowledge base.
What you'll need
A caution that matters more here than anywhere else. Investigation documents carry employee personal data, allegations about named people, and often privileged analysis. Before anything is uploaded, confirm that your company's approved tool and its data settings are cleared for this kind of material: whether chats are used for training, how long they are kept, and who at your company can see them. Replace every employee name with initials or a role ("E.R." or "Manager 2") and remove contact details, identification numbers, and health or family information. Leave out your own strategy notes and any legal analysis. Whether using an AI tool affects privilege is unsettled, so follow your company's policy and your state bar's guidance. Where the matter involves outside counsel, a regulator or a pending claim, tell outside counsel you plan to use the tool and follow their direction before you upload anything. If the matter is serious enough that outside counsel leads it, this guide is for your coordination work only.
What you should see: A folder of numbered, abstracted files. Troubleshooting: Claude extracts text only from non-PDF documents, so a Word file with a screenshot of an email inside will lose the screenshot. Export those as PDF.
What you should see: Each file listed with its name in the message area. Troubleshooting: Anthropic's help center lists limits per chat on file count and size, and PDFs are capped by page count. If you exceed them, split the set into batches by date range and build the timeline in stages.
Paste the prompt below, edit the matter name, and send.
Build a chronology from the uploaded documents only. Return a table with these columns:
1. Date (as written in the document; use "unclear" if the date is missing, partial or ambiguous)
2. Time (if stated)
3. Event (one sentence, neutral wording, no conclusions)
4. People involved (initials only)
5. Source document (file name)
6. Page or section (PDF viewer page number, or the heading or paragraph)
7. Date certainty (stated, inferred, or unclear)
Rules:
- Do not fill gaps. If two documents disagree on a date, list both rows and say they conflict.
- Do not characterize anyone's conduct. Describe what a document says happened.
- Do not use outside knowledge.
- After the table, list every date you marked "unclear" and every pair of conflicting documents.
- Order rows by date, with "unclear" rows at the end.
What you should see: A table with one row per event and a source and page for every row. Troubleshooting: If rows show no page, reply "Add the page or section to every row, or write not stated."
Reply in the same chat: "Which events are mentioned in one document but never confirmed by another? List them with file names." These are the points to run down with HR or the witnesses.
What you should see: A short list of single-source events. Troubleshooting: If the list is long, the documents may be thin on corroboration. That itself is worth telling the lead investigator.
Add a document later:
I have added a new document. Add its events to the table, keep the same columns, and flag any row that conflicts with an earlier one.
Narrow to one person (by initials):
Show only the rows involving E.R. Keep the source and page for each.
Check for completeness:
Which of the uploaded documents contributed no rows to the table? Tell me why for each.
From the conflicts and gaps in the table, list the questions an interviewer should ask. Do not suggest what the answers are.