Nobody reads a story about your case with a blank slate. A reporter, a juror, a board member — each one already has a rough sense of who companies like this defendant are and who plaintiffs like your client tend to be, and they check every new fact against that sense before they check it against the record.
That's confirmation bias, and it isn't a flaw unique to your audience — it's how everyone processes information under time pressure, which is most of the time. The practical consequence for a case is blunt: whichever account a reader hears first becomes the lens they run every later fact through, whether or not that first account was the most accurate one.
This is the mechanism behind filing-day positioning, not just a preference for speed. If the defendant's "isolated incident" framing reaches a reader first, every subsequent fact about a pattern of practice gets filtered as an exception to that framing, not evidence against it. If your client's account reaches the same reader first, the opposite happens — the defendant's later statements read as the exception. Being right isn't enough if you're right second.
It means the earliest true, sourced account of a case matters disproportionately — not because later coverage doesn't count, but because it has to work against whatever frame already landed. It also means correcting a bad first story is real work, not a matter of supplying better facts later; you're not informing a neutral reader, you're dislodging a belief they've already started defending. Understanding that is the difference between a communications plan built to inform and one built to actually change what people think.