Glossary
Legal Technology Glossary
Terms used across this site, defined the way we use them. Where a term comes from legislation, the definition follows the legislation rather than marketing usage.
- Audit Trail
- A chronological record of who did what and when. In legal software it means every assessment, approval and document version carries an author and a timestamp that cannot be edited afterwards.
- Clause Extraction
- Pulling structured fields — parties, term, liability cap, governing law — out of contract text so they can be searched and compared instead of read.
- Contract Lifecycle Management
- Managing an agreement from request and drafting through negotiation, signature and renewal, in one system rather than across email and drives.
- Controller
- Under the GDPR, the party that decides why and how personal data is processed. Distinct from a processor, which acts on the controller's instructions.
- Data Processing Agreement
- The Article 28 contract between a controller and a processor setting out subject matter, duration, purposes, security measures and sub-processor rules.
- Deployer
- Under the EU AI Act, an organisation using an AI system under its own authority. Most legal departments are deployers rather than providers.
- DPIA
- Data Protection Impact Assessment. Required where processing is likely to result in a high risk to individuals; documents the risk and the measures taken against it.
- E-Discovery
- Identifying, preserving, searching and producing electronic documents for litigation or a regulatory request, with privilege markers preserved.
- Explainability
- The property of a system whose outputs can be traced to the inputs and rules behind them. In legal work this usually means every result links to a source document or clause.
- Fallback Position
- A pre-agreed alternative in a playbook, used when the counterparty rejects the preferred position, so the business does not have to escalate every negotiation.
- High-Risk AI System
- Under the EU AI Act, a system in a listed area such as employment or credit, subject to risk management, logging, documentation and human oversight duties.
- Legal Hold
- An instruction suspending routine deletion of documents relevant to anticipated or ongoing litigation.
- Limitation Period
- The time within which a claim must be brought. Calculated per jurisdiction, and affected by judicial holidays in several of them.
- Matter
- A unit of legal work — a dispute, a transaction, an investigation — with its own documents, deadlines, owner and cost record.
- Obligation
- A commitment created by a signed contract that someone has to perform after signature, such as a report, a payment or a notice.
- Playbook
- The written set of positions a company accepts in negotiations: preferred wording, fallbacks and red lines, per agreement type.
- Precedent Search
- Finding prior decisions or prior internal work on the same question, ranked by similarity of substance rather than keyword overlap.
- Processor
- A party processing personal data on behalf of a controller, bound by a data processing agreement and acting only on documented instructions.
- Record of Processing
- The Article 30 inventory of processing activities, covering purposes, categories, recipients, transfers and retention.
- Redlining
- Marking proposed changes to a draft agreement so both sides can see what moved between versions.
- Retention Period
- How long a document must be kept, driven by the obligation behind it rather than by the document type alone.
- Standard Contractual Clauses
- European Commission model clauses providing a lawful basis for transferring personal data outside the EEA, normally paired with a transfer impact assessment.
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