How a record is built

You do not start by telling the story. You start by gathering what exists: the messages, the letters, the screenshots, the recordings, the filings. Then you write down what is being claimed, and tie each claim to the thing that shows it. Then the dates, in order. Then the exact words people used. Last, for every allegation, whether the person it names was ever given a chance to respond.

The order matters because each step needs the one before it. A claim needs a document to point at. A date needs something that happened on it. A quote needs a place it came from. Built this way, the record can be read by someone who does not believe you and still hold.

Every claim is marked for what it is. Not for whether it is true, and not for whose side it helps: for what kind of thing it is. The stamps are the whole method in five words.

Two of these are easy to get wrong in the worst month of your life. Alleged is not an insult; it is where every claim starts, including the ones you know to be true, until a document backs it. And Mood only is not a waste bin; what you felt belongs in the record, in its own place, where it cannot be mistaken for evidence.

The two-letter codes are the ones the method uses in print. They are small on purpose: the stamp is for you, the code is for whoever reads the record after you.

A gap is a place where the record promises more than it holds. The product watches for five of them and turns each into a question you can answer.

Working the gaps down is what makes the record useful to a lawyer on the first day, and it is the product’s quiet promise: by the time you hand it over, the questions a careful reader would ask have already been asked.

An interview-style assistant helps you get what happened out of your head and into the record, one question at a time, in plain words. It knows the whole record so far and the open gaps, so it can ask about the letter you mentioned, or the date that has nothing behind it.

What it does: it drafts records. Dated events, people, documents you have or could get, claims marked Alleged until a source backs them, quotes verbatim with where they come from, and gaps. Everything it drafts waits for you to confirm, edit or discard.

What it never does: it never adds anything you did not say. It never decides that something is true. It never characterises a person beyond what your account says. It never gives legal advice, never tells you what to do, and never contacts anyone. Where you are matters a great deal in a dispute, so it asks, and it can flag that rules differ and that deadlines exist; it does not say what they are for you. If you describe danger to yourself or someone else, it stops interviewing, says so, and shows where to get help.

You set the pace. You can stop at any point without losing anything. And in its first words, it says once what it is and is not.

Not legal advice. A record you control.