The records arrived as ten thousand files and no structure

It arrives as a drive link or a mailbox export: photographs, spreadsheets, scans, duplicates of duplicates, folder names that meant something to somebody who has left. Somewhere in it is the claim. Every question asked of it costs an afternoon, and the afternoons are coming out of a dispute timetable that does not pause for archaeology.

Quantum runs on retrieval. A cost needs its invoice, an event needs its diary page, a valuation needs the application it answers, and when the evidence is a heap, every figure gets built twice, once to find the paper and once to use it. Worse, the gaps stay invisible: nobody can say what is missing from a pile, so the weak heads are discovered by the other side instead of by you.

The organising pass is the unglamorous foundation of everything that follows: duplicates cleared, files foldered by contract, topic and cycle, an index that lets each head of claim point at its evidence. After it, the chronology and the figures are built from the same spine, and the ten thousand files become the case's asset instead of its excuse.