Legal & Tech Glossary.
A comprehensive reference for bridging the gap between traditional legal terminology and modern legal tech operations.
A
Audit Trail
A secure, immutable, chronological record that provides documentary evidence of the sequence of activities that have affected at any time a specific operation, procedure, or event.
B
Bailment
The transfer of possession, but not ownership, of personal property by one party to another, under agreement.
C
Cause List
A daily schedule issued by a court detailing the cases to be heard, the presiding judge, and the allocated courtroom.
Clause Library
A centralized, searchable repository of pre-approved legal paragraphs or conditions used to rapidly draft standardized contracts.
D
Discovery (e-Discovery)
The pre-trial phase in a lawsuit in which each party investigates the facts of a case, specifically referring to electronic data and digital documents.
E
Entity Extraction
An AI process used in legal tech to automatically identify and extract key information (names, dates, monetary values) from unstructured text.
F
Force Majeure
A contract provision that relieves the parties from performing their contractual obligations when certain circumstances beyond their control arise.
H
Habeas Corpus
A writ requiring a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court, especially to secure the person's release unless lawful grounds are shown.
I
Indemnification
Security against legal liability for one's actions, often a clause in contracts to shift risk between parties.
J
Jurisprudence
The theoretical or philosophical study of law and the legal system.
L
Legal Hold
A process that an organization uses to preserve all forms of relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated.
M
Metadata
Data that provides information about other data. In legal contexts, this often refers to the hidden properties of electronic documents, such as creation dates and author details.
N
Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)
A legal contract establishing confidentiality between parties, restricting the sharing of certain proprietary information.
O
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
The electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text, crucial for digitizing physical legal documents.
P
Pro Bono
Legal work undertaken voluntarily and without payment as a public service.
R
Redlining
The process of editing and negotiating a contract by tracking changes, traditionally done with red ink, now managed digitally.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
An AI framework that improves the quality of generated responses by retrieving relevant information from a secure, external database (like a firm's document vault) before answering.
S
Smart Contract
A self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement directly written into lines of code, residing on a decentralized or secure network.
T
Tort
A wrongful act or an infringement of a right (other than under contract) leading to civil legal liability.
V
Voir Dire
The process through which potential jurors from the venire are questioned by either the judge or a lawyer to determine their suitability for jury service.
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