Making archives searchable by digitalisation and applying artificial intelligence to this will not only generate new information, but opens also the door for new questions. On basis of a case study from the Court of Friesland, the importance of this digital unlocking and method is shown: network analysis in three similar cases demonstrates and visualises the dominance of certain sources (allegations) in the network over other sources and by that the different working methods of the involved lawyers. This type of analysis is very useful to expose patterns which cannot be discerned otherwise when dealing with large quantities of civil litigation records from the Courts of Holland and Friesland. In this way until now hidden relations between names, places, dossiers and allegations, and even interprovincial links, may be revealed and lead to new investigations.