How Cedent builds a matter from your email and documents

A matter in Cedent is assembled from your real work. As email arrives and documents come in, Cedent reads them and builds out the case: a running summary, a timeline, the people involved, and the documents themselves. You do not type this in — Cedent reads it from what you already have.

What this looks like in practice

Say a new email arrives from someone asking you to handle their divorce. Cedent reads it, recognizes it as a possible new client rather than mail for an existing case, and surfaces a new-matter suggestion with the client’s and opposing party’s details already filled in. You run a conflict check, open the matter, and from that point on Cedent takes over the filing: the original email and the rest of the conversation attach to the matter, a synopsis starts to take shape, dates and events land on the timeline, and any attachments are read in. Over the next little while, as Cedent works through related mail and documents, the matter fills out into a working picture of the case.

The rest of this page explains each part of that.

Cedent proposes matters; you create them

Cedent never creates a matter on its own. When email looks like a new client rather than an existing case, it surfaces a new-matter suggestion with the client and opposing-party details filled in from the email. Before you open the matter, Cedent runs a conflict check against the people you already work with, so you are not unknowingly taking on both sides of a dispute or a party you already oppose elsewhere. You decide whether to create it.

When you do create a matter, Cedent can also reach back through your mailbox and pull in earlier email that belongs to it, so the case does not start empty even if the relationship is months old. From then on, related email files into the matter automatically.

The synopsis

Every matter has a synopsis — a structured summary of the case, organized into sections appropriate to the practice area. For a family-law matter, that covers things like the parties, key dates, children, support and property, and scheduled hearings. Each piece of information is a fact that carries two things with it:

Its source — the email or document it came from, so you can trace it back.
How trustworthy that source is — a date from a certified court order counts for more than the same date mentioned in passing in an email.

How the synopsis stays current

As new information arrives, Cedent reconciles it against what is already there:

New information is added as Cedent learns it.
Better-sourced information updates an existing fact automatically, and the change is recorded so you can see what changed and why. For example, if an early email put the hearing on March 3 and a later court order says March 10, the court order — the stronger source — updates the date, and the change is logged.
Conflicting information of equal or greater weight is held for your review rather than silently overwriting what is there. When two sources of similar standing disagree, Cedent flags the discrepancy and leaves the decision to you.

Completeness

A matter shows how complete its synopsis is, section by section. A low number is rarely an error — it usually means Cedent has not yet seen the email or document that fills those gaps. Read it as a map of what is still open, not a grade.

The timeline

The timeline is the case in chronological order. It captures two kinds of things:

Case events — filings, court orders, service, hearings, discovery, and deadlines that Cedent reads out of your email and documents. These are the milestones of the case.
Activity — email received and sent, documents added, drafts produced, and facts updated. This is the running record of work on the matter.

Each entry links back to what it came from, so you can go straight from a line on the timeline to the email or document behind it.

The people on a matter

As Cedent reads a matter, it identifies the people involved — your client, the opposing party, opposing counsel, experts, and others — and keeps them with the matter. Because the same person often appears across cases (an opposing counsel you face in several matters, say), Cedent recognizes them as one person with a presence in each matter, rather than as unrelated names. That is also what lets the conflict check work: Cedent already knows who you represent and who you oppose.

Documents

When a document arrives as an attachment or you upload one, Cedent reads it — including scanned PDFs and images — so its text is searchable and available to the case and to any drafts built from it. If the same file shows up twice, Cedent recognizes the duplicate instead of cluttering the matter with copies.

It takes a little time

Building a matter is not instant, especially when Cedent is working through a backlog of past email or a stack of documents. A matter may look thin at first and fill in over the next while as Cedent pulls in mail, reads documents, and works the facts into the synopsis. You can see this progress as it happens — for example “Pulling emails from your inbox…” or “Building your summary…” — so a half-built matter is never a mystery.

Checking Cedent’s work

Because every fact and timeline entry traces back to a source, you can always confirm the picture: open a fact or event, follow it to the email or document behind it, and check it reads the way Cedent summarized it. If it does not, your correction becomes the authoritative version. See Where Cedent’s answers come from.

Common questions

A matter looks empty or thin — is something wrong? Usually not. Cedent is still working through the related email and documents. Give it time, and watch the progress indicators on the matter.

A fact I expected is missing. Cedent only records what it has seen. If the email or document carrying that fact has not been filed to the matter yet — or is sitting in your triage inbox — the fact will not appear until it is. Filing the source brings the fact in.

Cedent updated a fact on its own — can I see why? Yes. Automatic updates happen only when a better-sourced version arrives, and each one is recorded on the timeline with what changed and what it was based on.