Legal: Litigation Chronology Assembly with Claude Code: Build vs Buy Decision
A production playbook for litigation chronology assembly in legal operations using Claude Code: build vs buy decision, run-scoped inputs, logs, typed results, and artifacts.
Audience: Litigation teams preparing case timelines
The problem
Litigation teams preparing case timelines need litigation chronology assembly to run repeatedly against pleadings, discovery exports, emails, deposition notes, and evidence folders. In legal operations, the pain is not one good answer; it is repeatability, auditability, exception handling, and evidence that survives handoff.
Implementation path
Compare the work required to operate litigation chronology assembly: sandbox lifecycle, provider credentials, input injection, logs, artifact delivery, retries, and result validation.
Tradeoffs and failure modes
Building gives total control; buying the runtime compresses the path to a customer-facing workflow. For litigation chronology assembly, the practical test is whether a second run can be debugged, retried, and consumed by a product without reading the raw agent transcript.
Decision table
Build internally if you need bespoke infrastructure primitives.
Use Argo if you need litigation chronology assembly as a product workflow: inputs, Claude Code, logs, result JSON, and artifacts.
Use both if a specialized sandbox must sit behind a stable run contract.
Run this on Argo