Capstone

Capstone: Calder Valley Water

Calder Valley Water is an invented water and sewerage company with 1,030,000 customers in three regions. Its in-house lawyer, Ms Ines Okoro, has been asked to put a paper to the board on Friday, and to prepare material for a meeting with the regulator the week after. Complaints appear to have risen sharply since the company changed its billing system on 1 July. A data analyst, Mr Pavel Ng, has produced a draft pack of charts, with help from an AI tool, and Ms Okoro has to decide what to show. The board must decide whether to approve 600,000 for a fix to the billing and call-centre processes, and whether to tell the regulator about the rise before the meeting. The communications team wants a headline that complaints have ‘doubled’; Mr Ng wants to show the whole story in a nine-series chart; and the head of operations is worried that the numbers will be misread. Everything is invented. Use the four tools of the course and write a one-page decision summary.

General education on visual communication for lawyers, using invented organisations, people, data and cases. It states common practice in simplified form and does not describe any one country's law or court rules, which differ and change; rules on exhibits, demonstrative aids, disclosure, candour and confidentiality in particular vary. The tools apply simple rules to descriptions and text that you supply. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace advice from a qualified lawyer on a real matter.