Nobody trusts the chronology

It happens on every file that grows past one pair of hands: the delay narrative has its dates, the quantum its periods, the correspondence schedule its own sequence, each rebuilt from whichever documents that fee-earner had open. None is wrong exactly, none agrees either, and the differences surface at assembly, when the deadline is closest and the time to resolve them already spent.

A tribunal does not read a chronology for interest. It reads it for the entry the documents contradict, because one such entry licenses doubt about every entry that follows. A case argued from three private timelines will eventually put the wrong date in front of the person marking it, and the repair costs credibility the case needed for the real fight.

The fix is not another reconciliation meeting. It is the record read end to end once, by one reader, with every material event fixed to the document it comes from, so every workstream draws its dates from the same settled spine.