Deposition Prep, When the Evidence Is a Pile of Bank Statements

When a case turns on money, the evidence almost never shows up as a spreadsheet. It shows up as statements — and rarely from just one place. Accounts at three or four different banks, a shoebox of card statements, maybe a few exports from an accounting system nobody at the firm uses. Every institution lays its statements out differently: different columns, different date formats, different ways of describing the same transfer. Hundreds of pages. Thousands of transactions. No two sources shaped alike. And a deposition on the calendar.

In my years working with law firms, I watched what happens next more times than I can count. The work of turning that pile into something an attorney can actually question from lands on a paralegal — on top of everything else on their desk. Weeks of retyping, highlighting, and cross-referencing. Hours the client will fight when they see the bill, or hours the firm quietly writes off. Either way, case work waits while data work gets done by hand.

Here's the thing: that pile is a data problem, and data problems have a faster answer.

What "data engineering for a case" looks like

The goal isn't to read the statements. It's to rebuild what happened from them — one clean record of every transaction, from every account, in one place, in order. Getting there looks like this:

Extraction. Every statement — PDF, scan, export, whatever arrived — becomes rows in one dataset. Date, amount, account, payee, description. This is where the multiple-bank problem gets solved: each institution's layout is just a format to be mapped, and once it's mapped, the format stops mattering. Four banks' statements become one table. This is the step that eats a paralegal's week; it's the most automatable part of the whole job.

Standardizing. Different banks describe the same thing differently. The same vendor hides behind six different payment descriptions. Standardizing collapses all of it, so "who got paid, and how much, over what period" has one answer instead of six partial ones.

The timeline. With every transaction in one dataset, the questions attorneys actually ask become filters, not archaeology. Every transfer between these two accounts. Every payment to this person, ever, totaled. What moved in the ninety days before the filing date. Each one takes seconds — and each answer comes with a page-by-page trail back to the source document, because an exhibit is only as good as its citation.

The gaps. This is the part that surprises people. Once the money is in one picture, the missing pieces show up on their own — the account that appears in one statement's transfer line but was never produced, the months with no activity where there should be some, the deposits with no visible source. Reading a production tells you what's there. Reconstructing it tells you what isn't.

What comes out the other side

Not a binder of highlighted PDFs. A clean, sortable record of every transaction with its source cited — plus the summaries that turn it into deposition material: money in and out by account, flows between parties over time, patterns worth putting in front of a witness. The attorney walks into the deposition with a timeline instead of a stack, and questions built on totals nobody can wave away.

And the paralegal? Freed to do the work that actually needs their judgment. That matters to me. The point of this is never to replace anyone — it's to take the weeks-long grind off a desk that has better things on it. The paralegals I've worked with are the ones who win these files; my job is to hand them a dataset instead of a pile.

Why an analyst, and not just software

There's no shortage of tools that promise to read a PDF. But a case doesn't need a tool — it needs someone who knows what a reconstruction has to survive: opposing counsel, a judge, and a witness with an explanation for everything. Twenty-five years of cost analysis and audit work taught me to build the record so every number traces to a page, every total can be re-derived, and every gap is documented rather than guessed at. That's the difference between a summary and an exhibit.

The files stay on my machine, the work is confidential, and nothing about your case needs to leave your control beyond the documents themselves.