How to find contradictions in witness statements

The inconsistency that matters is rarely between two statements. It is between a statement and a document written when nobody was thinking about litigation.

Two witnesses describing the same meeting differently is normal and rarely worth much. A witness describing a meeting one way while an email sent that afternoon describes it another way is a different thing, and it is the thing worth the search time.

Compare claims, not documents

Comparing documents is the wrong unit of work. Documents are long, they cover several subjects, and two documents that overlap on one point will differ on twenty others for no interesting reason.

Break the file into claims instead. One claim is one assertion of fact, recorded with who made it and which sentence it came from. Now comparison is tractable, because you are asking whether two short statements about the same thing can both be true.

Contemporaneous material carries more weight

A witness statement is written for the proceedings, by someone who knows what the case is about, often years after the events. An invoice, a calendar entry or an internal email was written by someone with no reason to think about any of this.

When those two disagree, the disagreement is worth something. When two statements disagree, it is usually memory.

So rank your search: statement against contemporaneous document first, document against document second, statement against statement last.

What a usable contradiction record looks like

Both sides, in full, with their sources. Not a note saying the accounts differ. Six months later that note is unusable, because rebuilding what it referred to takes as long as finding it did the first time.

Record:

the two claims, quoted;
the document each came from, with its exhibit reference if it has one;
the date of each document, because which came first often decides what the conflict means;
one line on why they cannot both be true.

That last line is the one people skip. Write it. If you cannot, you may be looking at two statements that are merely different rather than inconsistent.

Watch for the false positive

Most apparent contradictions dissolve on inspection. Two documents use the same word for different things. A date refers to when something was agreed rather than when it happened. A figure is net in one place and gross in another.

This is why the output of any automated pass is a queue for review rather than a list of findings. The machine can put every candidate pair in front of you with both sources attached. Deciding which ones are real is legal judgement and stays that way.

Doing this at the scale of a real file

Comparing every claim against every other claim by hand is not possible past a few hundred documents, which is why it usually does not happen and why inconsistencies surface during cross-examination instead of during preparation.

Legalnaut runs that comparison and surfaces the surviving pairs with both documents, both dates and both checksums attached. Contradictions are treated as findings rather than errors, which is also why they are marked in the brass accent rather than in red. A finding is something you use.

Legalnaut does this to your own case file: a chronology built from the documents, every finding showing the source it came from. See the plans.