Legal vocabulary
Check AI legal work. 28 hand-written terms with real workplace examples.
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Duty of Competence
A lawyer's duty to bring the knowledge, skill and care that the work needs. In many places it now includes understanding the benefits and risks of the technology they use, AI tools included.
Client Confidentiality
The duty to keep information about a client's matter private unless the client agrees or a rule allows sharing. It decides what may be typed or uploaded into an AI tool.
Informed Consent
A client's agreement given after the lawyer explains the risks and alternatives in plain terms. For putting client confidences into an AI tool, a generic line in an engagement letter is usually not enough.
Duty of Supervision
A supervising lawyer's responsibility for the work of junior lawyers, staff and the tools they use. AI output is treated like a junior's draft that an accountable person must review.
Attorney-Client Privilege
A protection that keeps confidential communications between a lawyer and client, made to get legal advice, from being forced into evidence. Sharing them with outsiders can waive it, so where an AI tool sends data matters.
Work Product
Materials a legal team prepares in anticipation of litigation, such as notes, drafts and strategy memos. They are generally protected from the other side, so prompts and AI drafts that reveal strategy get the same careful handling.
Zero Data Retention
An arrangement where an AI provider does not keep prompts or outputs after answering and does not train on them. Legal teams look for it in the contract before sending client material to a tool.
Ethical Wall
Access controls and procedures that keep people with a conflict of interest away from a matter's information. AI tools and the knowledge sources they search need to respect the same wall.
Grounding
Tying an AI answer to specific source documents, such as the case file, a statute or a legal database. Each claim can then be traced back and checked against the source.
Knowledge Source
The material an AI tool is allowed to draw on for an answer: the open web, a legal database, the firm's precedents or one matter's documents. Picking the right one is half the task.
Binding Authority
Law a court must follow, such as statutes and decisions of higher courts in the same jurisdiction. Persuasive authority can guide a court but does not bind it, and an AI tool may not tell the two apart unless asked.
Jurisdiction
The place or court system whose law applies and that has the power to decide a matter. An AI tool can answer with the wrong state's or country's law unless it is told which one applies.
Fabricated Citation
A citation to a case, quote or statute that does not exist or does not say what is claimed, often produced by an AI tool. Courts have sanctioned people who filed them.
Cite Check
Verifying every citation in a document: the source exists, says what is claimed, is quoted accurately and is still good law. It is the step that catches errors an AI tool can introduce.
Pin Cite
A citation to the exact page or paragraph where the support appears, not just to the case as a whole. It lets a reviewer jump straight to the passage and confirm that an AI summary matches it.
Good Law
A decision or statute that is still valid: not overturned, reversed or repealed. Lawyers confirm it with a citator before relying on a source, since an AI tool may cite one that no longer stands.
Document Review
Reading a set of documents to decide which are relevant, privileged or important in a lawsuit or investigation. AI can make the first pass, and people check its calls.
Tabular Review
Asking an AI tool the same questions of many documents at once and getting the answers in a grid: one row per document, one column per question. Each cell links to its source text, so a person can check it.
Due Diligence
The investigation before a deal: reviewing a company's contracts, records and liabilities to find risks before signing. AI tools can speed up the reading, and lawyers judge what the findings mean.
Privilege Log
A list of documents withheld from the other side as privileged, with enough detail for the claim to be challenged: date, author, type and basis. AI can draft the entries, and a lawyer confirms each privilege call.
Redline
A version of a document that marks every change against the earlier version, with insertions and deletions shown. It lets a reviewer see exactly what an AI tool or the other side changed.
Clause Library
An organized collection of approved contract clauses and alternates that a team reuses instead of drafting from scratch. An AI tool can pull from it, so drafts start from language the team already trusts.
Contract Playbook
A team's written rules for reviewing and negotiating one type of contract: the preferred position, acceptable fallbacks and what needs escalation. An AI tool can review a draft against it and flag each gap.
Fallback Position
A pre-approved alternative term a negotiator may offer when the preferred term is rejected. Writing it down lets a person, or an AI tool following the playbook, respond without new sign-off each time.
Legal Engineering
Designing and building how legal work gets done with technology. It turns a lawyer's process into workflows, templates and agents that other people can run and check.
Process Map
A step-by-step picture of a legal task: its inputs, steps, decisions and outputs. Drawing one before automating shows where an AI tool fits and where a person needs to decide.
Reusable Workflow
A saved sequence of AI steps with fixed instructions and checks that anyone on the team can run the same way each time. It turns one person's good prompt into a repeatable method.
Approval Gate
A checkpoint where a named person reviews and signs off before an AI tool, workflow or output is shared more widely or sent to a client. It keeps a person accountable for what goes out.
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