Before and after. Today, the fact section that hides its own best fact.
Fact sections tend to start at the beginning of the day and walk forward. The names are invented. The habit is not:
“On the morning in question, Plaintiff awoke, prepared for work, and proceeded to travel southbound on the access road. Traffic was light. At approximately 3:14 p.m., Defendant’s tractor-trailer, which had been operating with a brake defect the company had documented in March, entered the intersection against the signal.”
Pass One: Find the Fact That Decides the Case.
Read that paragraph and find the sentence that wins. It is the last one, and it is doing two jobs the reader is too tired to notice: a brake defect, and a company that documented it months before. Everything in front of it is throat-clearing. A judge decides how to read your whole fact section in the first two sentences. Do not spend those two sentences on the weather and the commute.
Pass Two: Lead with It.
“In March, the company wrote down that this truck’s brakes were failing. It kept the truck on the road anyway. On October 14, at Milam and Prairie, those brakes did not stop, and the truck ran the signal into Maria Garcia’s car.”
Same facts. Nothing added, nothing embellished. The winning fact now stands where the reader is guaranteed to see it, and every sentence after it lands on a reader who already knows what the case is about.
Pass Three: Now the Chronology Can Run.
Chronology is not the enemy. It is just not the argument. Once the reader knows what the day meant, walk the timeline in order, because now she is reading it looking for the thing you told her mattered. Theme first, sequence second. Order is argument.
Why It Matters.
The statement of facts is the one part of a brief a busy judge is guaranteed to read, and it decides the posture she brings to everything else. And the other edge, because a fact section is a promise: every fact you lead with has to be one you can prove cold. Open with a fact you cannot back and you lose the reader for the rest of the brief, which is the one thing a fact section cannot afford.
