This first methodical design cannot, however, define fixed and detailed standards for the other case studies. It turned out that the natural data (protocols, files, transcripts etc.) produced in the various court-systems differ a lot in status, format and content. It turned out, moreover, that even notions such as pre-trial and trial or preparation and performance carry cultural implications. Similarly, legal documents and judicial staging are embedded in different "epistemic processes" (Knorr). They are different things obtaining certain functional positions within these processes. Any ethnographic comparison has to include the natural corpus of data itself in its comparative endeavour.

This is why each case study designed its very own data-packages to fit to the encountered status, format and content of the natural data. These specific packages represent the local courses of legal case work. In an experimental fashion, the group decided to include cross-cultural data as well: E.g. photographs of the court-rooms, recordings of the practitioners’ file-presentation and court-room reports from the local newspapers.

The main challenge of our trans-sequential analyses is a methodical one. The task to link the moment-by-moment nature of procedural events and the stage-by-stage nature of legal processes must resonate with an excellent corpus of data. In other words, the data need to be sufficiently detailed in order to response to the research interest on when and how exactly things took place and unfold.

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