A concise summary is one which puts in all material facts. In 1988-90 I taught part of the Monash Uni civil procedure course as part of the research for my Ph.D thesis, to final year law students. I told my students that that clarity is something one had to learn because most people don’t have it!! Information presented in a written form, such as a court document or a letter , must be well argued, properly ordered and logical.

At Elephant Concepts my team and I assemble “all material facts” by: • compiling chronologies of complex series of events and transactions; • summarising relevant documents and compiling lists for complex discovery; • finding relevant experts and framing the instructions for them; • providing examples of similar items for consideration of the experts, when obtaining valuations of business, real estate, plant, equipment, personal property or investment items; • using non-internet resources - we love old books - or non-English-language sources. • wading through the “impressions” of a lay witness to obtain the essential facts.

Most people see things in terms of themes. If you ask someone about a neighbourhood dispute you‘ll get a litany of complaints about poor manners, about spying, about suspicions of stealing or damaging property. You‘ll get little real evidence, you‘ll hear instead things like:

‘Oh, they‘re always awful, yelling at the passers-by, putting their garbage on the street in front of our house‘ and so on. When you press people for actual dates and times you’ll find that in ten years there have been only six or eight incidents, and that many of them were fairly minor.

For court, lawyers want a chronology, something in point form with events sorted with precision and by date.

Trials are best put together on a systematic listing of events on chronological order, cross-referenced either to documents tending to prove or disprove them or to other evidence in the form of expert witness statements. In preparation for a trial one needs witness statements, real evidence that can be produced in the courtroom and real evidence to be obtained on views.

If you are short of time or staff you may find it more cost effective for me to interview your witnesses in order to ascertain relevant facts.

Assembling facts: Putting the relevant facts together requires some intuition. Take an argument about the cracking of concrete in a car-wash. This is the sort of factual problem which may indeed be posited in a text-book: the concrete cracked, and we’re litigating over why.

The text-book, especially if it deals with expert evidence in building disputes, will probably suggest that any number of expert opinions can be gained as to the reasons why concrete in a car-wash would crack. It could have something to do with the solvent used in the car wash, or the passage of vehicles over the car wash, or the pressure of water from the hoses, or the structure of the footings, or movement of the substratum due to the passage of heavy transport over nearby roads. Or it may have something to do with the heat of the day on which the concrete was poured and the amount of water used in the mix. If presented as a junior lawyer finds them above there is only one chance in six of the heat of the day being the causative factor.

An experienced concreter would tell you that the most common reason for concrete to crack is a failure to adjust the water mix for a high ambient temperature with a consequent high setting rate. A check of the weather pages of the relevant day‘s newspaper will prove or disprove the hypothesis to the requisite standard.

We at Elephant Concepts have the intuition to do that, as well as to do complex discovery work. We identify sources, assess their expertise and always verify information, especially information about people.

Contract rates by the (8 hour) day from $1100 including GST. Casual rates by the hour from $150 including GST.