In complex litigation, some of the most important facts are buried in the most difficult formats—like phone records. Phone records are tough. Really tough.
Unlike emails, which often come with searchable metadata and clear threading, phone records tend to arrive in messy, inconsistent formats. They’re hard to read, harder to search, and nearly impossible to layer meaningfully into a broader timeline of events without hours—sometimes days—of manual effort.
That’s why phone records are the ultimate stress test for evidence review platforms. And they’re exactly where ChronoTracer excels.
From Documents to Events: Why Phone Records Break Traditional Workflows
For most litigation teams, the standard process looks like this: documents are loaded into a review platform like Relativity or DISCO, where users can search by metadata, date ranges, or keywords. This works reasonably well for some kinds of evidence, especially emails. But when it comes to building a timeline across multiple evidence types, things break down quickly.
Phone records usually contain no content—just metadata. Which phone number called which phone number, when, for how long. No names. No recordings. No transcripts. No subject lines or message bodies. Just raw logs of activity.
And those logs are messy. Records come from different carriers, each with its own format and conventions. They show up as phone bills, subpoena returns, forensic phone images, call logs pulled from devices—each source just a little different, often wildly so. Sometimes they are PDFs, sometimes text files or .csv, sometimes spreadsheets. You might get codes instead of names, UTC instead of local time, or 1,000-page PDFs with 400,000 calls. You get the point—they’re a mess. (Even a single carrier may use multiple formats depending on the date range and how the data was produced—but that’s a story for another day.)
In cases where timing, coordination, knowledge, or intent matters, phone records should be a goldmine. In practice, they’re often a wall of noise. If you don’t already know which numbers are important, it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Control-F and a highlighter isn’t a great strategy.
The best case requires one or more associates reading through long, unstructured PDFs, identifying relevant numbers, matching those to parties, and cross-referencing them with other forms of communication. It’s a slow, error-prone process.
The document-centric model of e-discovery tools doesn’t help here—it treats massive phone logs as just another file. Whether you’ve got one call or a million, you’re stuck with one record. That means limited searchability, no filtering, and no ability to pivot from one event to the next. Just endless scrolling.
A Smarter Way to Work Across Evidence Types
ChronoTracer flips that model by extracting events—not just documents—from emails, phone records, chat transcripts, social media posts, and more, then interweaving them into a single, unified chronology.
Instead of treating an extensive phone bill as a document, we treat it as structured data—cleaned, labeled, and ready to tell its story. Each call or text becomes an individual event in a searchable chronology. We normalize formats across carriers. We link numbers to real names—using reverse lookup services and our user-defined identity associations—so you see “Matt Kim” instead of “+1 917-555-0199.”
We also show phone records in context. Want to know who the defendant called after a key video meeting? Which co-workers Matt called most in spring 2023? What a 12-minute call was probably about on Sept. 23 at 2:17pm? ChronoTracer puts every call next to surrounding emails, texts, and messages—so you’re not guessing in the dark.
And we don’t stop at call logs. If you’ve got voicemails, we’ll transcribe them. Got recorded phone calls, like from a wiretap? We handle those too. ChronoTracer pulls it all into the same unified chronology, with playable audio files and transcriptions ready to search.
Designed for the Way Legal Teams Actually Work
ChronoTracer is not an ediscovery platform replacement. It doesn’t manage privilege logs or handle production. Instead, it’s purpose-built to ingest evidence from existing systems—Relativity, DISCO, Reveal, PDF dumps, forensic phone images, audio logs, spreadsheets—and transform them into actionable event data.
ChronoTracer doesn’t just make document review faster—it makes evidence interpretation more intelligent. Its real strength shows up when users need to:
- Combine email communications with phone calls and texts into a single timeline
- Assign multiple contact points (phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) to a single individual
- Search for moments where two or more specific people appear together in a call or message
- Quickly answer time-sensitive questions like, “Was this person in the loop?” or “Did this call happen before or after the email?”
It’s About Using Lawyer Time Better
ChronoTracer dramatically reduces the hours typically spent manually building and revising timelines—but that doesn’t always mean fewer billable hours. It means smarter hours.
Instead of burning time pulling raw call data or assembling Excel timelines by hand, teams can focus on the next layer of legal analysis: What does this timeline mean? How do we use it? Where are the gaps? What’s the story?
Phone records shouldn’t be where good cases stall. One customer told us: “Even if ChronoTracer only handled phone records, it would be unbelievably valuable.”
With ChronoTracer, phone records are just the beginning.If your team is spending too much time stitching together timelines from call logs and other evidence—or if you’ve ever thought “there has to be a better way to search across all of this”—ChronoTracer is that better way.
Request a demo to see how ChronoTracer transforms the toughest documents into strategic clarity.