Draft Witness Statement

Skill: Witness Statement Drafting

1. Subject-matter triage (only if applicable)

• This skill applies when drafting a witness statement for arbitration or similar dispute proceedings from source documents and the witness’s own account.
• Confirm the witness’s role, period of involvement, and the parts of the project or operations actually within personal knowledge.
• If the materials contain multiple relevant events, dates, workstreams, or operational periods, identify them first and keep the chronology explicit rather than compressing them into a single narrative.
• If the task names a required output file, produce that deliverable as the primary artifact and ensure it contains the operative witness statement, not a summary of it.

2. Failure modes the skill is correcting

• Makes legal characterizations instead of describing the factual circumstances within the witness’s personal knowledge.
• Fails to address overlapping operational events, leaving sequence and concurrency unclear where the opposing party may attack timing.
• Speculates about the cause, extent, or technical meaning of equipment damage rather than distinguishing direct observation from hearsay or report-based knowledge.
• Blends the witness’s account with counsel’s theory, causing argument to masquerade as evidence.
• Omits the source basis for key factual assertions, leaving the statement unsupported by exhibits or contemporaneous records.
• Uses imprecise document references that make it hard to trace the witness’s testimony back to technical records, emails, or reports.

3. Legal frameworks / domain conventions that apply

• Witness statement convention: state facts within personal knowledge; avoid advocacy, commentary on merits, or legal conclusions; identify when a statement is based on what the witness saw, did, sent, received, or was told.
• Arbitration evidence convention: present a coherent, chronological factual narrative tied to exhibits, with clear attribution for documents, reports, and communications.
• Concurrency and sequencing: when shutdown, maintenance, commissioning, repair, or inspection periods overlap, set out dates, scope, and sequence factually so the tribunal can see what happened when.
• Damage-knowledge limitation: where the witness did not personally inspect the equipment, say so and separate first-hand observation from later reports or third-party conclusions.
• Technical foundation: where the account turns on technical specifications, standards, or operating parameters, identify those materials precisely and attach the supporting documents where available.
• Contemporaneous-record practice: emails, diaries, reports, logs, and meeting notes are preferred anchors for recollection and should be used to support the narrative where they exist.

4. Analytical scaffolds

• Begin with the witness’s education, career history, and operational responsibilities, then explain why those responsibilities make the witness a competent factual witness on the relevant events.
• Draft chronologically from project mobilization or operational handoff through the disputed events and any post-event follow-up.
• For each disputed topic, use a simple factual sequence: what was planned, what was observed, what was communicated, what action was taken, and what the witness personally knows versus what was reported to them.
• For overlapping events, set out the scheduled period, the actual event period, the scope of each, and the overlap, if any, before describing the operational consequence.
• For damage or defect issues, describe visible condition, symptoms, testing, shutdown impact, or inspection context only to the extent personally observed; avoid guessing at internal failure mechanisms or full loss quantification unless directly known.
• For technical documents, refer to them by title, date, version, or exhibit label, and use them to anchor the witness’s recollection rather than to argue interpretation.
• Use the witness’s own contemporaneous communications as exhibits where they corroborate dates, decisions, instructions, or observations.
• If the witness lacks direct knowledge on a point, say so plainly and avoid filling the gap with inference.

5. Vertical / structural / temporal relationships (only if applicable)

• When the witness’s testimony depends on a chain of operational events, preserve the hierarchy: plan, execution, deviation, response, and aftermath.
• When one event may have occurred during another, state the relationship expressly rather than implying it; if the overlap is partial, identify the portion that overlapped.
• When several documents speak to the same issue, use the most direct contemporaneous record first, then supporting records, then later summaries.
• Keep the statement temporally anchored so that each factual section can be matched to a date or date range without ambiguity.

6. Output structure conventions

• Use standard witness statement form with a heading, witness identification, and a declaration of truth at the end.
• Include a witness background section covering qualifications, role, and scope of involvement.
• Use a chronological factual narrative with short topic headings for each disputed operational issue.
• Include separate factual sections for planned maintenance, shutdown or interruption events, equipment condition or damage, communications, and any relevant technical specifications.
• Cite exhibits in-line by label and ensure the exhibit list matches the citations used in the body.
• Keep the tone factual and neutral; avoid submission-style rhetoric, argument, or legal characterizations.
• Where an asserted fact is based on a document rather than direct observation, identify the document and the basis for the witness’s knowledge.
• End with a concise exhibits list and a declaration signed in the witness’s name or in the form appropriate for the filing venue.