You Are Not Ready Yet
If you are looking for a system, a shortcut, or a way to “organise your case,” stop here. You are not ready.
What follows is not a method for understanding your material. It is a method for surviving it without lying to yourself.
If you have not already done the work below, anything you build will be neat, persuasive, and wrong.
This is not about structure
If you think the difficulty lies in chronologies, claims, matrices, or tooling, you are misunderstanding the problem.
Those come last. They are the residue of work that most people never do.
The work you have not done yet
Before you are allowed to interpret anything, you must be able to do all of the following without flinching:
- Collect every document you have, including the ones you don’t understand, don’t like, or hope are irrelevant.
- Accept that institutional bundles are designed to obscure, not clarify.
- Take a 400–600 page custody PDF and tear it apart into individual custody episodes.
- Split those episodes further into procedural moments.
- Take CAD logs and split them into atomic communications, not “incidents,” not “calls,” not “outcomes.”
- Treat blank pages, silence, and gaps as data, not noise.
- Accept that CAD records often contain the only contemporaneous truth.
- Accept that custody records frequently rewrite that truth after the fact.
- Work for weeks without a narrative, without a claim, and without knowing “what this is about.”
You are not allowed to understand yet
Understanding comes later. Meaning comes later. Claims come much later.
At this stage, your only job is to destroy false coherence.
- No summarising.
- No reframing.
- No “this shows that…”.
- No trying to be persuasive.
Why this will feel unbearable
Because this phase offers no insight, no validation, no visible progress, and no sense of control.
It replaces clarity with accumulation and certainty with delay.
Most people escape here by inventing structure too early. That is how they end up defending something indefensible later.
A warning, not a promise
If you proceed without doing this work, the system will still function. The outputs will still look impressive. Other people may even be persuaded.
Under pressure — legal, professional, or adversarial — it will collapse, and you will not know why.
The collapse will not be the system’s fault. It will be yours.
When you are ready
- You can point to any document and say exactly where it belongs in time.
- You can tolerate contradictions without resolving them.
- You trust CAD silence more than institutional narrative.
- You no longer feel urgency to “make sense of it.”
Only then are you allowed to build.
Until then, stop.
This is not gatekeeping. It is harm reduction.