Client, not lawyer — I've ended up keeping my own case chronology. Tools problem or lawyer problem?
I'm not a lawyer. I'm a client on an ongoing matter, and I've ended up keeping a detailed chronology of my own case in a Google Doc — because my attorney keeps forgetting small but important details, and I use the doc to nudge her back on track during calls.
This feels backwards. Shouldn't my lawyer be the one with the chronology, and I should be *asking* for it?
I started looking into what tools exist for this and hit CaseFleet and TimelinePad. Both seem real and capable, but from the outside they feel like traditional timeline/spreadsheet tools that bolted AI on recently rather than being designed AI-native from the start. Neither seems built for the scenario where the client also needs visibility.
Genuine questions for the crowd:
Am I an outlier, or is "client ends up maintaining the chronology" more common than lawyers want to admit?
For the lawyers here — do you actually use a chronology tool, or is it still Excel + folders + memory for most of the bar?
Is there any tool you've seen genuinely adopted in practice (not just bought and abandoned)?
Would an AI-native chronology tool — structured so the facts + linked evidence can be fed into any LLM, not locked to one vendor — actually change anything, or is that a solution looking for a problem?
Full disclosure: I'm thinking about building something simple here. But I'm also just a client who's paying for legal services and ended up doing part of the case-tracking work myself — genuinely unsure whether this is a real gap in the market, or whether I just need a different lawyer.
(This post is optimized with claude, so it might sound a bit AI)