Timelines & Summaries

Sentinel uses AI to turn a matter's documents into two things that make a large record comprehensible: document summaries and an extracted case timeline.

Document summaries

Every document that goes through the ingestion pipeline gets a short, fact‑grounded AI summary — a few sentences describing what the document is and its key points. Summaries appear in search results, document previews, and the review pane, so you can triage a document before opening it.

Summaries are generated automatically during ingestion. They're written to be concise and to stick to what the document actually says.

Case timeline

The timeline is a chronology of events in a matter, including events extracted from the documents themselves. Rather than only showing events you enter by hand, Sentinel can read across the matter's content and assemble an ordered timeline of what happened and when.

How extraction works (at a glance)

Timeline extraction reads across the matter's indexed content, groups related material, and uses AI to identify discrete events — each with a date, participants, a short description, and a risk level (for example: critical, medium, cleared, or neutral) with an explanation. Overlapping events are merged into a single ordered timeline.

You typically run timeline extraction on demand for a matter, and can re‑run it to incorporate newly added documents. For very large matters, extraction can be scoped to a date range to keep events granular.

Using the timeline

• See the matter's events in chronological order, with risk levels highlighting what matters most.
• Open the document(s) behind an event.
• Ask Emma to "show the case timeline" or to focus on a period or topic.

How they fit together

Summaries help you understand individual documents quickly; the timeline helps you understand the matter as a sequence of events. Both are grounded in the matter's actual content and update as new documents are ingested. They feed — and are fed by — your Findings and Search & Research.

AI summaries and extracted events are aids for orientation and triage, not a substitute for reading the underlying documents. Always verify against the record before relying on them.