Environmental litigation doesn’t move fast. One of our founders has been working on a Superfund site for over a decade, and the case is still going. Cases go dormant during settlement negotiations, pause for regulatory reviews, and restart when new evidence surfaces. Meanwhile, associates move to other firms and partners retire.
When the case finally reactivates, the new team faces a predictable problem: getting back up to speed without missing anything critical.
The Reconstruction Tax
You’ve seen this before. Superfund litigation with hundreds of PRPs, tens of thousands of documents, years of dormancy. When the case restarts, someone needs to rebuild the timeline: which parties operated the site when, what investigations found, when contamination was identified, where the documentation is.
Building that understanding from 14,000 pages isn’t billable strategy work. It’s reconstruction. And when cases go dormant and reactivate years later with new counsel, firms often pay that reconstruction cost twice—once when the initial team built the case, again when the new team tries to understand what the previous team learned.
What Institutional Memory Actually Means
Institutional memory in litigation means having a defensible, queryable record of the site’s history that persists independent of who’s working the case. Timeline continuity where every significant event is extracted and organized chronologically. Source traceability where every event links to the specific document, page, and paragraph. Knowledge accessibility where new team members can query the corpus and get cited answers. Defensibility that withstands discovery and cross-examination.
How Statvis Eliminates the Reconstruction Tax
Statvis was built around the principle that site knowledge should persist independent of personnel.
Automated Timeline Extraction
Timeline processes every document in the case file and extracts significant events—ownership transfers, contamination discoveries, regulatory notices, remediation activities, party involvement periods. Each event includes the date (distinguishing event date from document date), description, and citation to source document, page, and paragraph.
When the case restarts after dormancy, the timeline is already built. New team members query it rather than reconstruct it.
Evidence-Cited Responses
Every Timeline event and every Chat response includes a citation to the source document with a direct link to the specific page and paragraph. When opposing counsel challenges a liability date, you click through to the exact passage that documents it.
For Superfund allocation disputes, establishing that Party X operated the site from 1978-1985 (and not 1975-1988) can shift potential liability. The difference between “we believe” and “as documented on page 47 of the 1979 site investigation” is defensibility.
Knowledge That Persists
Statvis processes documents as they arrive, adding them to the knowledge base and updating the timeline. When the case goes dormant for three years, the knowledge base remains queryable. When new counsel joins, they ask “When was contamination first identified?” or “Which parties operated the site during the 1980s?” and get cited answers in minutes.
The knowledge persists. The timeline remains defensible. New team members get up to speed in hours, not weeks. For a Superfund case with 14,000 documents and 200+ PRPs, avoiding reconstruction means the difference between confidence and uncertainty when the case reactivates.
Avoiding the Reconstruction Tax
Environmental liability cases turn on documentation: who knew what, when they knew it, and how it was recorded. The firms that win these cases have complete, defensible knowledge of the site’s history.
Statvis was built for that purpose. Timeline extracts the events. Citations link every claim to its source. The knowledge base persists independent of personnel turnover.
When your case spans years and your team changes twice, institutional memory becomes infrastructure.
Want to see how Timeline works with your litigation documents? Book a demo and bring a sample case file. We’ll show you what automated timeline extraction looks like with your actual documents.