Name: Shape Case Theory from Day One with Storybuilder
Uploaded: 2026-09-24T18:15:08.529Z
Duration: 1 h 14 min 28 s
Description: Shape Case Theory from Day One with Storybuilder

Transcript for "Shape Case Theory from Day One with Storybuilder": Hello. Welcome, everybody, to today's webinar. It's good to see everyone here. My name is Zach Souza. If you don't know me, I am a member of Erolaz customer marketing team bringing on events like this for our users, and I just wanted to welcome you today. We are gonna be starting part one of our narrative building series, shape case strategy from day one with story builder. So this is part one in a two part series. We're excited to have you here, learn a little bit about how story builder can get you off the ground running, from day one. You don't have to wait until review is done in order to get a head start in your narrative building process. You do all of that together as a team collaborating easily from the start of your matter. Before we get into details, I'm just going to go through a few housekeeping items. First off, I wanna mention that today's session will be fully recorded. You will receive a link to the recording if you're attending to, in an email within the next twenty four hours. You can also revisit the link you use to join us live at any point in the future, and it will take you right to the recording and where you can watch this again on demand. On that note, if you do run into any audio or video issues during today's session, there is light mode. You can turn that on as a toggle. You should see a button underneath the video feed, and that should solve most of your audio or video issues. You wanna drop into the chat, say hi to everybody in the audience. You're gonna do that on the right hand side of your screen under the chat tab. So tell us how you're doing. Tell us where you're coming from. It's always good to see this session chat, nice and active. If you have a question for our speakers about today's topic, so if it's regarding story builder or some of its features, you're gonna wanna drop those questions directly into that q and a tab. So, again, just so that we don't miss any questions, if we can actually check and make sure we get as many questions as possible, please put them in that q and a tab. The third thing I wanna talk about is our docs tab. We've got a number of links to, resources and other things happening around Everlaw, so check those out. One of those things is Everlaw Summit twenty twenty six coming up in just over a month, so we're almost there. We're really excited about this three day conference. You get to come visit us in person. You'll meet people from Everlaw. You'll meet other users, of Everlaw from other organizations. You can get 10% off your ticket order with code webinar. So if you're thinking about registering, there's no time better than now. Buy your ticket, use that webinar or use that webinar checkout code, and, we'd love to see you in person. So we're super excited about that coming up. Alright. Now we will shift to today's topic. First, I'm gonna launch a poll. This poll is live shortly, and we want to get a sense of the audience confidence level, currently using story builder and the story builder features today. So, if you're, advanced user, you can let us know. If you're never used story builder before, that's okay. That's why you're here. Let us know so we can kinda get a sense for where everyone is today. And while that poll is up, I'm gonna leave it up for another minute. I'm going to hand it off to our user education team to get the session started. Alright. Thanks, Zach. Hi, everyone. I'm Lily, and I'm excited to walk through Story Builder with you today. So thanks for filling out that poll. It's always helpful to see where folks are starting. In this first session, we are going to focus on the foundation of story builder. How to think about setup, how to build back timelines, how to organize your evidence with labels, and how to start pulling documents into your story. We will also include a brief demonstration on how to use deep dive to find relevant evidence for your case. To make this concrete, we are going to use the example of a wrongful termination lawsuit. In our scenario, the plaintiff alleges both age discrimination and disability discrimination. So we're going to build two related timelines and keep our evidence organized around those two theories. That means you'll see the same issue names repeated across our fact timeline and our evidence page labels. So the structure stays consistent from the beginning. And with that, we are going to move into Everlaw and open the story builder from the quill icon in the toolbar. I am gonna go ahead and hide my video so you can see as much of the screen as possible. We are actually going to start out by using an already filled in story builder project to give you a better idea of how the dashboard looks. So let's start with the big picture. Story builder is Everlaw's narrative building toolkit. It gives your team a shared space to organize the facts of the matter, the evidence you care about the most, the writing you're doing around the case, and the deposition workflows that grow out of that work. When I open a story, I like to frame it as a workspace that gets more valuable the earlier you start shaping it. You do not need to wait until review is finished to begin here. First, the dashboard. This gives you a high level view of the evidence in your story, suggested documents to pull in based on coding, the date range of your documents, and more. In practice, that often means starting simple, deciding how you want to organize the matter, using fact timelines, creating a few labels that reflect your issues, and beginning to add known facts as they appear. The evidence page is an organized overview of everything in your story. Each rectangle is a piece of evidence, an entire document, a snippet, or a testimony from a transcript. Importantly, your story doesn't include every document in the project. You add key items as you find them during review. For today, I'm not going deep into admin configuration. Instead, I want to model the decisions a case team makes at the start of a matter so attendees can picture how to apply this in their own cases. Finally, drafts and depositions. These are collaborative word processing tools. Drafts link evidence into a body and depositions, add prep, summary, and transcript tools. And with that, let's head over to our empty story. So here we are opening a project that has a blank story so we can get started on our wrongful termination case prep. Just a reminder here. In our wrongful termination example, the first key decision is that we do not want one giant undifferentiated chronology. We want separate lanes for the age discrimination story and for the disability discrimination story while still keeping them under the same broader case narrative. Let's move to fact timelines. Facts are the building blocks of your case narrative. Each fact is a discrete event or piece of information that matters to your story. For this matter, I'm creating a timeline called age discrimination. This will capture the events that support or contextualize that theory of the case. One fact I might add here is a manager comment About wanting fresh energy on the team, that is the kind of event that may become important later even if I only have a part of the picture at the start. I'll give it a date, And I'll give it a short description so anyone on the team can understand why my fact is here and how it may matter. I'll add another fact for the performance improvement plan issued to the employee. This is a good example of a fact that may ultimately connect to multiple issues in the matter. Now I'm creating a second timeline called disability discrimination. This lets us track a different theory without mixing every event into one long thread. Here, I might add a fact for the employee accommodation request. I might also add a fact for the discussion around return to work restrictions and whether the team responded appropriately. Alright. Let's move on to a very quick chat prompt. Please respond in the chat and let us know what kind of cases could you see yourself using fact time lines for. Alright. I love what I'm seeing in here. It sounds like a lot of you can use fact timelines in your current workflows. Thank you so much for responding and continuing to respond, and let's now move on to our evidence page. This is where the key evidence in your story lives. One of the biggest habits that will help your team later is getting labels in place early. Labels let you organize what belongs to which issue, which person, or which workflow. For this matter, I'm creating an issue label called wrongful termination. I'm also creating age discrimination and then disability discrimination. The important thing is that these labels match the organizational logic we already used in the timelines. That consistency is what makes story builder feel clean instead of fragmented. I'm gonna go into our fact timeline and add some of the labels. At this point, I can also add some of our documents into evidence. I'm gonna do that by using the Bates numbers, and I'm going to do the same to my other fact timeline. Moving into our evidence here, if I filter by age discrimination, I can immediately narrow down to just the evidence related to that issue. And if I switch to disability discrimination, I get that line of evidence instead. Now you will notice that our issues are grayed out. The reason for this is because our documents have not been given labels yet. We are going to do that together in just a little bit. Some facts can and should carry multiple labels. A single performance document, for example, may matter to the broader wrongful termination story and also to one specific discrimination theory. Over time, labels also help you connect evidence to people, drafts, and depositions. So the payoff is not only on the evidence page. It carries forward into later story builder workflows too. So at this point, we have two timelines and a matching label structure. That means we now have a framework for sorting evidence as it starts to come in. Let's look at how documents actually get into a story. But first, we'd love for you to answer a question for us. What labels could you see yourself using within story builder on a current case? I'm seeing some great answers in the chat, and I hope that seeing each other's ideas helps you come up with new ones. But now let's take a look at how documents actually get into the story. To do this, we'll take a look at documents I've already organized for these fact timelines. From the review window, I can add a document directly into story builder. Here, I'm adding a full document because I want the whole document preserved as evidence in the case story. As I do that, I can set the title. I can set the date. I can add a description or a relevance note. If helpful, I can use an AI generated description as a starting point and then review and edit it later. For this example, I'll tag it as wrongful termination and as age discrimination. I'll also associate it with a relevant fact in the age discrimination timeline so that the fact and the evidence stay connected. Now let's say the full document is long, but only one paragraph is especially important. In that case, I can highlight the excerpt and just add the snippet into the story. That gives me a more targeted piece of evidence, which can be especially helpful when I want to focus on the exact language that matters. I'll do the same as I did before. And relate this document to the accommodation process. And just tag this one as disability discrimination so our second timeline stays just as usable. This can also be done in batches. For this, I'll take a set of documents I've collected, selecting batch and modify, and it allows me from here to select facts that I would like to attach my documents to. At this point, we have the core part one workflow. Create the structure, create the facts, create the labels, and then add documents into that structure as you identify them. Let's head back to the fact timeline first. Once I open my facts, you can now see the document is now linked directly to that fact. This is where the setup starts to pay off. Instead of the fact living on its own, it now carries the supporting evidence with it, so the timeline becomes more than just a list of events. I can move from the fact straight into the evidence that supports it, which makes this especially useful when I'm preparing to explain the chronology to a teammate or pressure test a theory. The same is true with our disability discrimination timeline. Once we've connected the accommodation related documents to the right fact, that issue thread starts to feel much more complete and easier to follow. Now let's return to the evidence page. Here, we can see the document and snippet we've added showing up alongside the labels we've applied. And because the evidence is tied to a fact, I'm not just looking at isolated documents. I'm looking at documents that already have a narrative context. If I switch over to disability discrimination, I can do the same thing for that issue and compare how the two theories are building out in parallel. This is really the core story builder workflow we want to model. You create a structure first, then as documents come in, the timelines and evidence page become more useful together. Before we close, I want to show one additional workflow that can be helpful once you've already started building out your facts. If I'm looking at a fact and I want to find more supporting evidence for it, one option is to use deep dive to ask a question in natural language across the documents in my project. If I'm looking at a fact and I want to find more supporting evidence for it, one option is to use deep dive. Just to give everyone an overview, Deep Dive is Everlaw's generative AI question and answer tool. You ask natural language questions about your case, and it returns citation backed answers grounded only in documents that have been enrolled for deep dive within the project. It does not search the open Internet or other matters. You can use deep dive one of three ways. First, you can ask questions across your entire enrolled project. Second, you can narrow your questions to a specific results table if you want to focus on a smaller set of documents. And third, you can use deep dive on deposition transcripts in story builder where you can ask questions across transcripts and get citation backed answers showing how deponents testified on that issue. I'm building out our disability discrimination timeline, and I've already got a fact on there. Accommodation request denied. But that's all I've got. I know it was filed. I know it went nowhere, and I have no idea how that decision actually got made or who was in the room. So we're gonna go to deep dive, and we're going to ask What evidence shows how the employer responded to the employee's accommodation request? What deep dive can help with is to surface relevant documents and excerpts that may support, complicate, or even expand that fact, which can be a really useful way to keep building the story as your understanding of the case develops. And look at that. Deep dive goes and finds the documents and excerpts that speak to it. Sometimes it confirms exactly what you suspected, and sometimes it hands you a conversation you didn't know happened or shifts your timeline by three weeks. Both are wins. This is how the story keeps building as your understanding of the case develops. Now here's my favorite part. I've read the cited materials and the evidence that was discussed, and I decide what's actually useful. So from here, I'm gonna go to my resources. I'm going to select my documents, and I'm going to add it straight into story builder. From here, I can go ahead and attach them to the fact. I do wanna call out one important note here. Deep dive requires an Everlaw AI contract, so this is not something every attendee will automatically have available in their environment. If this is a workflow you'd like to use, please reach out to your Everlaw point of contact to learn more about availability, pricing, and what AI options are enabled for your organization. Even if you are not using deep dive today, the broader idea still holds. Story builder becomes more powerful when you keep connecting facts, evidence, and your evolving case theory. Before we wrap up, let's quickly recap. In part one, we used story builder to give a new matter some shape right away. We built two issue based timelines, created matching labels on the evidence page, and added documents into the story so the facts and evidence start working together. One quick reflection before we close. Which of the story builder elements would you set up first in your own matter? I'm seeing so many great responses. We'll build on today's discussion in our upcoming story builder webinar, where we'll explore building a stronger case faster by analyzing transcripts, creating your exhibit list, and preparing for crucial depositions, all in a single collaborative workspace. You can sign up through the link in the docs tab labeled part two webinar registration. Another way to find webinars just like this one is to use our training center. So how do we get there? Just quickly, I want to demonstrate because our training center is an amazing resource for more than just webinars. To get there, you're going to go through the home help button, select view all help resources, and then select the training center. From here, you're gonna want to select all resources. This is our training center. In the very middle, we have all different types of available information from videos, downloadable resources, knowledge base articles, and live trainings. Underneath, you can filter which topic you'd like to learn about. For webinars, you can select live trainings and select which webinar you would like to sign up for. If you wanna learn more about story builder overall, take a look at the story builder filter here where we have live trainings, videos, downloadable guides, and more. Before we wrap up today, I'd love if everyone could respond to one last poll for us. Please head to the polls tab on the right side of your screen and let us know how comfortable are you with using story builder to set up and organize a case theory now. Thanks, everyone. And with that, I'll pass it back to Zach to wrap us up. Alright. Thank you everybody for a great session today. Big thanks to our speakers. Show them some support in the chat. They put a lot of time into prepping for these, and we're really happy we could deliver another event like this for you all. On that note, we wanna hear your feedback about how today's training went. So you should see a link up on your screen now to access a short survey. Tell us everything that you can, what you'd like to look forward in the future, how today's session went. And our user education team looks at all of those responses that come through, and they apply that to their next session that they plan. So please, if you have a minute, I would we would love for you to give us that feedback. I have a reminder for a couple of more events like this one coming up. The next event happening just next week on September 29 is actually an ethics CLE accredited webinar about the ethical obligations for legal AI workflows. So if you haven't seen promotion for that yet or have registered, the link is in the docs tab. There's no fee for that CLE credit. We are not charging for one hour of ethics credit, which is accredited currently in most states. You can check out all the details on the registration page for how that works. We'd love to see you there and help you get your credit towards your, whatever you need for your CLE purposes. And then we also have part two of our narrative building sales building on what we learned today. So that's build stronger cases faster from depo prep to transcript insights. That's happening on October 13. So we've got a packed couple weeks here between these events and summit. Again, all the registration links are in the docs tab. Please check them out. Register if you haven't yet. We wanna see as many of you out there as possible. And then just a last one final reminder to join the Everlaw community if you haven't yet. You should see a button at the top of your screen to join the Everlaw community. You're already part of the community by coming to events like this and becoming better at being an Everlaw user and using all of these tools, especially like story builder. So the community is a space where you can connect with other users, learn their workflows, get some tips and best practices from them. We've also got a number of, dedicated events for you all if you're a community member. One of them actually wasn't on my last slide, but it is coming up. We have a round table with tips and tricks diving deeper into a user perspective of Story Builder, and we're also gonna be hinting and previewing, some new integrations that story builder is coming up. So if you wanna learn more and you're curious about that, join the community and look for that next event coming up. So with all that, I will just leave you here with a reminder to come join summit. There's not, there's still time left if you wanna come see us in person. And, otherwise, we have a number of ways you can reach out to support or access more training resources. I'll leave a slide up for y'all to look at. Fill out that survey. It's still open. You can still click on that link. And with that, I will say goodbye. Thank you, everybody, again. It was a great day and, great webinar. So we really appreciate you all. Bye.