Company Case Construction from Published Documentation

Source Identification

The first stage of case construction is determining what relevant documentation exists and what portion of it is accessible. For publicly traded Canadian companies, this includes regulatory filings, governance disclosures, and annual reports filed with provincial securities regulators. For other organizations, the starting point is typically the organization's own public website, along with any third-party sources that may have published relevant materials.

Building a complete source inventory before beginning analysis is methodologically important: it prevents premature conclusions and ensures that the case is calibrated to the actual evidential record rather than the subset of documents the reviewer happens to encounter first.

Establishing the Analytical Frame

Once source materials are collected and verified, the reviewer must establish the analytical frame: the specific question or set of questions the case is designed to address. The frame determines which aspects of the documentary record are most relevant and how the materials should be organized for presentation. A well-defined frame prevents case sprawl — the tendency for cases to expand beyond what the evidence can support.

Scoping Conclusions to the Evidence

The most common failure mode in corporate case construction is drawing conclusions that exceed what the documentary record supports. The available documents provide a partial, organizationally mediated view of what happened. Conclusions about causation, intent, or organizational quality that are not grounded in explicit documentary evidence should be avoided or clearly flagged as inference rather than finding.