When, in 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) formally recognized electronically stored information (ESI) as discoverable, it opened the floodgates to a new era of litigation—one defined by overwhelming volumes of digital evidence.
At the same time, with the growth of the internet and the ubiquity of smartphones, the world has created dramatically more digital information. To put that into perspective: in 2006, the estimated volume of data created globally was 161 exabytes, or 0.161 zettabytes. This year, that number is estimated to hit 181 zettabytes. That’s a staggering 112,322% increase.
Legal technology has evolved to meet this moment.
E-discovery platforms have added powerful tools for automated document review, AI-driven privilege analysis, and early case assessment. But there’s one critical function most e-discovery tools still don’t perform: automatically building a comprehensive and interactive case chronology.
Why Automated Chronologies Are Essential in Modern Litigation
Litigation often turns on a clear understanding of what happened, when, and who was involved. That means building a reliable chronology is foundational to everything from early case assessment, to deposition prep, motion practice and persuading a jury.
The massive growth of data isn’t just shown by volume—it’s also evident in variety. Modern case files can include data types like:
- E-mails
- Text messages of every kind (SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.)
- Slack and Teams messages
- Phone records and call logs
- Media files (images, audio and video recordings)
- Social media posts
- Financial transactions
- Mobile data and app metadata
- PDFs
These data types are often fragmented, messy, and, when viewed as individual documents in an e-discovery system, lack context. And yet, chronologies must be built. They form the foundation of the legal narrative: what happened, when, and who was involved. Without a reliable way to piece together the full story, key facts get lost, time is wasted, and strategy suffers.
Why eDiscovery Tools Struggle With Chronologies
Modern e-discovery platforms do a lot of things well. They’ve matured into powerful engines for organizing, reviewing, and tagging evidence.
Some e-discovery platforms now offer some form of chronology feature—but what they really provide is a special-purpose empty spreadsheet. You can tag facts—sometimes in bulk—and drop them into a chronology view. Some platforms even offer AI to suggest potentially relevant facts.
But when you’re reviewing evidence out of order and out of context, it’s much harder to figure out what actually matters. You’re still left piecing together the narrative manually, with limited visibility into how events connect across sources.
That’s why even sophisticated litigation teams still resort to spreadsheets, Word tables, and shared drives to manage their case chronologies. These tools weren’t designed for this kind of task. They break down under scale, require lawyers to be spreadsheet wizards, and require constant manual upkeep.
ChronoTracer flips the model entirely.
How ChronoTracer Automates Timeline Building from Complex Evidence
Unlike other e-discovery tools, ChronoTracer automatically transforms complex evidence into a structured, filterable, and source-linked case chronology.
Here’s how: we pre-process your evidence to index it, normalize it, extract events and automatically build you a comprehensive chronology of who did what with whom and when. Then we present it back to you in an intuitive web interface. Because we are looking inside your documents, you are able to view the events in your case in order and in context.
- Dynamic parsing of complex evidence. For example: a large phone record of 35,000 pages with 2 million call events would be a single document in your e-discovery system. In ChronoTracer, it becomes 2 million separate events, searchable and filterable by time, participant and event type.
- Entity recognition and labeling. Once a phone number, email address, account or handle is linked to a name, every mention of that identifier across the evidence set is linked to the name and labeled.
- Living timelines. Timelines automatically evolve as new evidence is added, eliminating version confusion and duplicate work.
- Cross-source correlation. Emails, texts, phone calls, voicemails, media files, financial records and more can be unified into one chronology.
Still Using Spreadsheets? You’re Behind.
If your team is still copying facts into a Word table or sorting chat logs in Excel, you’re behind. These manual approaches break down under scale, lack auditability, and introduce unnecessary risk.
With ChronoTracer, your case chronology becomes a central, collaborative asset—one that enhances strategic thinking, strengthens all stages of litigation practice, and saves countless hours across the team.
The FRCP opened the floodgates to digital data in discovery. The legal industry responded with tools to manage the deluge, but stopped short of effectively helping teams automate case chronologies.
ChronoTracer picks up where your e-discovery platform leaves off, enabling your firm to extract strategy from chaos, turn evidence into insight, and elevate the work of your litigation team.
Want to see how ChronoTracer builds automated, source-linked case chronologies from your e-discovery data? Request a demo here.