Creating your Issue/Topic outline

Issues and topics are categories that you define. They let you organize the documents, extracts, facts and players in a MasterFile database much like a book's index.

For example, if you are storing documents which pertain to a set of sites relevant to an environmental project, you can create a classification category called "Sites" and a sub-category for each site name. And, like a book's index, if you link an item to several issues or topics, it will appear under each.

To help management, large collections of issues and topics can be organized into a hierarchical outline up to three levels deep i.e. section, subsection and issue/topic.

The issue/topic list is used to complete the "Links to issues, players or subject index topics" fields in document, extract, fact and player profiles, and is used by views to group profiles in the various "by Issue/Topic" views.

Issues and topics are almost identical; they are defined the same way and appear in all the same views. However, issues can be assigned an impact assessment as to how the issue affects your case: is it for you, against you, etc.

If your case has several parties, propositions or hypotheses, such as in an investigation, we suggest you do not assign an impact assessment to your issues and choose "Not applicable". This is because issues may impact each proposition differently. Instead, since you will in general have at least one fact representing each issue and that is where its argument will be set out, we suggest you only set impact assessments in facts, where they can be assigned to your propositions.

How you use the issue/topic view is virtually limited only by your imagination. Besides the issue/topic outline, you can use issue/topics to categorize, classify or group together documents, extracts, facts and players to mimic divider tabs (such as those related to administrative matters) of your hard copy case binder, as explained in the following section, "The Document Binder View", or even a corporate records binder.

You will find the following four unique features dramatically enhance the functionality of issues and topics:

  • Incomplete topics -- topics you complete "on-the-fly" when they're used.
  • Hidden topics -- topics that don't appear in the "by Issue/Topic" views.
  • Required issue/topics -- issue/topic categories that must be linked to new documents, extracts, facts and/or players.
  • Issue/Topic cross-table -- eliminates duplicating issues when the same issues apply to many situations in the case.

We look at them below.