after the fact

Idioms  

1. After an actual occurrence, particularly after a crime. For example, I know the brakes should have been repaired, but that doesn't help much after the fact. The use of fact for a crime dates from the first half of the 1500s. The word became standard in British law and is still used in this way today. The idiom was first recorded in 1769 in the phrase accessories after the fact, referring to persons who assist a lawbreaker after a crime has been committed. Now it is also used more loosely, as in the example above.

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Example Sentences

Burden wrote this long after the fact, when the binary nature of her marriage became self-evident.

From Los Angeles Times

Recovering money after the fact is so much more onerous than intervening while it’s happening.

From MarketWatch

Nonetheless, in 1971, a California Democratic congressman named Phil Burton blew the whistle after the fact, reading the secret Justice Department memo into the Congressional Record.

From Los Angeles Times

What separates the archaeologists and Egyptologists from the narrator, editor and supervisor of the music is that there are very few definitive answers to questions being asked three millennia after the fact.

From The Wall Street Journal

Inside the FDA, it appears to have done exactly that by changing requirements and demanding additional years of study after the fact.

From The Wall Street Journal