6.7 Organizing Legal Issues with an Influence Diagram

Complex legal cases may require multiple jury and judge rulings to determine the final decision. In such cases, it may benefit you to begin with an Influence Diagrams which allows you to start with the individual rulings, then organize them in the proper order to reflect the expected presentation in court.

An Influence Diagram for the TVU vs. Kool Coal case is presented below.

Each bubble represents a legal issues that require a ruling from the judge or jury. The lines emanating from each legal issue represent a finding of yes or no.

Within an Influence Diagram, it is easy to drag the legal issues around the canvas based on your understanding of how they will be presented in court. Then you can connect them with arrows to reflect that order. In addition, you can create value diamonds to indicate an end point for the pathways.

With an Influence Diagram, it is then straightforward to create chance nodes with yes/no branches for each ruling as shown below.

With the model structure in place, you can proceed to entering probabilities and values into the tree. The section about Influence Diagrams will provide more details on building them.