TLDR: Use narrative view and the narrative outline to structure the legal aspects of your case, incorporate fact/events from the spreadsheet view where needed. Aeon Timeline is an extremely flexible database app that you can customize to your needs in virtually any given litigation-type of case.
I was kind of hesitant to use narrative view for the past year that I’ve been using this app for legal chronologies. I mean, I wish I were talented enough at writing to write lucrative novels, but I just don’t think of legal writing/analysis in terms of narrative. So basically whenever I wanted to document a legal issue, I would put it in as an issue data type. Makes sense right? But I found that using the data type alone just didn’t give me enough visual cues for fleshing out my legal issues. Basically, I buried everything in a note field that was a meta data field for the issue item type.
But today I started using the narrative view when analyzing a new case and its great. I basically start with a folder in the narrative view. So I’m a criminal lawyer so I started out with a “charges” folder and then proceeded to create subfolders within it setting out the different charges and created an “elements” item type with a puzzle icon (symbolizing pieces of the puzzle) for the different legal crime elements making up each charge, which I put within each folder representing that charge. And I made a “law” item type to put legal citations in there, etc. Basically, it appears this is the best way to flesh out legal issues. This appears to be extremely flexible and you can make item types that directly correlate to how you analyze your case and your legal specialty.
Then, of course, you can incorporate existing facts/events into your narrative where needed. And then you can Order things as you like in the outline view. Thus, avoiding unnecessary duplication of entries.
