From Evidence Review to Hearing Preparation

Legal teams often face a familiar challenge after document production: how to transition from evidence review to building a compelling case narrative. Whether preparing for witness interviews, drafting affidavits, or organising for hearings or arbitration, the process is rarely seamless. Disconnected workflows and manual processes can lead to inefficiencies, duplication, and missed strategic opportunities.

Success in litigation or regulatory matters depends not only on the facts but on how clearly and persuasively they are presented. That clarity begins with how facts, documents, and testimony are assembled — ideally well before a matter reaches court or tribunal.

Why the Case Story Matters

Whether preparing for a regulatory response, arbitration, or civil litigation, a coherent narrative is essential. Traditional evidence management — focused on folders and document-centric review — often fails to support the construction of that narrative.

Legal professionals must sift through production sets, manually build outlines, and reconcile facts scattered across documents, notes, and statements. This fragmented approach can delay preparation and obscure key connections.

A story-centred approach changes that. By linking facts to issues, witnesses, and evidence throughout the case lifecycle, legal teams can shape the narrative as they go — not just at the end.

Building the Narrative Earlier

To support international litigation and investigation needs — such as witness preparation, affidavit drafting, and hearing bundles — story-first case preparation includes:

• Story View: Navigate cases using a structured view based on people, places, issues, and events, rather than folders and filenames. Facts are linked to evidence in a many-to-many relationship.
• Chronologies and Conceptual Outlines: Export outlines of facts, dates, and evidence — such as witness outlines, hearing outlines, and chronologies — filtered by concept and date range, with hyperlinked support.
• AI Analysis of Testimony and Documents: Use AI to extract and link facts, people, and events from interviews, statements, or transcripts, accelerating case building.
• Evidence Management Tools: Organise linked evidence into working folders, witness kits, or hearing bundles, and generate ready-to-file exhibit lists or statement indexes.
• Story-Based Security: Control access at the story level, ensuring users must access both the story and evidence folders to view or create links — eliminating the need for manual permissions editing.

These features — available in EpiqTMX — provide a structured, efficient way to prepare for hearings, arbitrations, and regulatory matters.

Linking Discovery to Preparation

One of the biggest sources of friction in international legal workflows is the disconnect between document review and case preparation. Evidence reviewed and tagged during Early Case Assessment (ECA) often needs to be reprocessed or relabelled when preparing for hearings or witness interviews.

Platforms that integrate discovery and preparation — such as Epiq Discovery — preserve annotations, issue tags, and document context. This continuity eliminates redundant work and ensures consistency across the matter lifecycle.
 

Supporting Strategy From Deposition Through Trial

Story-centred preparation supports early theme testing, real-time exhibit organisation, and consistent narrative development. Legal teams can generate outlines based on linked facts, not just document highlights. AI-analysed testimony or statements can be tagged to issues, connected to supporting exhibits, and exported into hearing bundles or summaries.

This structured approach improves readiness and reduces last-minute scrambles. Teams have a validated, linked record of what happened — and how they plan to prove it.

A Better Way To Prepare

The shift from document-centred to story-centred preparation reduces friction and increases strategic clarity. In international matters — where timelines vary and preparation must be thorough — legal professionals can shape the case narrative as it develops, not just at the end.

This means fewer rework cycles, smoother collaboration, and a stronger ability to focus on what matters most: the facts and how they’re presented.