Case analysis, term by term

Chronology A chronology is a dated list of the events in a dispute, each one traceable to the document that evidences it. Contradiction A contradiction is a pair of statements in the case file that cannot both be true, each one anchored to the document it appears in. Exhibit An exhibit is a document formally put before a court, carrying a reference number that stays fixed for the life of the proceedings. Bundle A bundle is the paginated set of documents filed for a hearing, indexed so any page can be found from the index in one step. Provenance Provenance is the record of where a piece of evidence came from and what has happened to it since. Checksum A checksum is a short fingerprint computed from a file, which changes if even one byte of the file changes. Chain of custody Chain of custody is the documented sequence of hands a piece of evidence has passed through, from collection to court. Audit log An audit log is an append-only record of who did what in a system and when. E-discovery E-discovery is the process of identifying, collecting and producing electronic documents for litigation. Privilege review Privilege review is the check that no legally privileged document is handed to the other side during disclosure. Redaction Redaction is the permanent removal of protected text from a document before it is disclosed or filed. Anonymisation Anonymisation replaces identifying details in a document with labels, so the substance can be read without exposing who it concerns. OCR OCR turns an image of text, such as a scan or a photograph of a page, into text a computer can search. Transcription Transcription turns recorded speech into text, so a recording can be searched, quoted and cited like any other document. Entity extraction Entity extraction pulls the people, organisations, places and dates out of a document and records where each one appeared. Claim A claim, in case analysis, is a single assertion of fact made in a document, recorded together with who made it and where. Deduplication Deduplication removes repeated copies of the same document from a case file, keeping one. Retrieval-augmented generation Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique where a language model is given relevant documents to read before it answers, instead of answering from memory. Hallucination A hallucination is a confident, fluent statement from a language model that is not supported by any source. Proof chart A proof chart is a table that sets each issue a party has to establish against the facts and exhibits that prove it, and shows where nothing does yet. Pin-cite A pin-cite is a citation that points to the exact page of a document, not only to the document. Cite-check A cite-check is the verification that every citation in a document points at a real source that says what the document claims it says. Witness dossier A witness dossier is everything a case file holds about one person, gathered for the examination: their statements, what was said about them, the documents they wrote, and the statements the file contradicts. Limitation period A limitation period is the deadline after which a claim can no longer be brought.