Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-11
Turn a pile of dated documents and emails into a clean evidence chronology without editorializing what it proves
Organizes messy, dated source material into a strict chronological timeline of events with source citations for each entry, deliberately stripped of any interpretation about what the sequence proves — built as a working draft for a qualified lawyer to verify and interpret.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Build a strict chronology from the dated source material below — a timeline of what happened when, with a citation to its source for every entry, and nothing added about what the sequence means or proves.
SOURCE MATERIAL (emails, notes, documents, with dates where available)
12 emails between two business partners spanning March-July 2026, plus 3 undated handwritten meeting notes referencing 'the March call'.
MATTER THIS CHRONOLOGY SUPPORTS
Internal review of a soured business partnership ahead of a possible dissolution discussion.
WHAT COUNTS AS A RELEVANT EVENT
Any communication about financial contributions, decision-making authority, or stated intent to exit the partnership.
HOW PRECISE DATES NEED TO BE
Exact dates where available; week-level precision is acceptable for anything only referenced indirectly.
EXTRACTION RULES
Go through the source material and pull out only dated or datable events, each as a single factual entry: what happened, exactly as stated in the source (paraphrase for length only, never for meaning), the date or best-available date range, and a citation back to which source document or message it came from. If a source is undated or only vaguely dated ("last week," "a few days after"), include it but mark the date as approximate and explain what it's approximate relative to. If two sources conflict on when something happened, include both entries with their respective sources rather than picking one as correct — that conflict itself may matter later and should not be silently resolved by you. Do not summarize multiple events into one entry if they happened on different dates, even if they're related — the chronology's value is in exact sequence, not narrative compression.
WHAT NOT TO DO
Do not add any interpretation, causal claim, or characterization of what the sequence shows, suggests, or proves — no "this establishes," no "this demonstrates a pattern," no editorializing adjectives about any party's conduct. A chronology that argues a position stops being a neutral chronology and becomes something only a lawyer should be constructing deliberately, with full awareness of how it will be used. Do not exclude an event because it seems unfavorable or irrelevant to Internal review of a soured business partnership ahead of a possible dissolution discussion. — that judgment belongs to the lawyer using this, not to you.
OUTPUT FORMAT
A strict chronological table: Date (or approximate date, noted as such) | Event (factual, sourced) | Source citation | Conflict flag (if applicable). No narrative summary section, no conclusions. End with a line stating this chronology is a draft organizational aid only, built from the source material provided, and that a qualified lawyer must verify its accuracy against the original documents and determine its legal significance before it is used in any matter.Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
The single hardest rule in this prompt — no interpretation, no causal claims, no characterizing adjectives — exists because a chronology's evidentiary value depends entirely on it being a neutral ordering of sourced facts, and GPT-5.1 left to its own devices will naturally narrate a sequence of events with connective interpretive language ('this suggests,' 'following this pattern') because that's what makes prose readable; that narrative gloss is exactly the thing that turns a useful organizational tool into an argument a lawyer would need to have deliberately constructed with full awareness of its persuasive framing, not something that arrived pre-baked from an AI draft. Requiring a source citation on every single entry, rather than a general note about which documents were used, matters because a chronology someone actually relies on needs to be independently checkable line by line against the underlying material — an entry without a traceable source is a claim resting on the model's summarization alone, which is not a standard anyone should accept for something meant to represent facts, not analysis. The instruction to preserve, not resolve, conflicting dates across sources is a specific defense against a model's tendency to quietly pick the more coherent-sounding version when two sources disagree; that conflict is frequently itself the meaningful fact (who said what, when, and whether accounts differ), and silently smoothing it away would erase exactly the kind of detail a chronology exists to preserve. Refusing to exclude events that seem unfavorable to the stated matter context keeps the model from doing the lawyer's job of selecting a narrative, which is a judgment call that requires legal strategy and privilege considerations an AI model has no visibility into and should never be making unsupervised.
What you get back
March 14, 2026 — Partner A emails Partner B proposing a 60/40 profit split, citing 'increased time commitment.' Source: Email, March 14 2026, 9:42am. Approx. late March 2026 (referenced as 'the March call' in handwritten notes, exact date not stated) — Handwritten note references a phone call where B allegedly agreed to revisit the split 'after Q2.' Source: Handwritten note, undated, cross-referenced to March. CONFLICT: Partner A's April 2 email states B 'never agreed to revisit anything.' This chronology is a draft organizational aid only — a qualified lawyer must verify its accuracy against original documents before it is used in any matter.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-11
Changelog
- 2026-08-11 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
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