Derivation record
A record that accompanies a filing and shows how it was made: what question was asked, what was searched, what was retrieved, what was rejected and why, and what a human reviewed.
First used in The Verification Layer Is a Smoke Alarm, Not a Building Code
The derivation record answers the question courts and insurers increasingly ask after the fact, which is less "did it pass a check?" than "how was it made?" An attestation says a document passed at a given time. A record shows the process that produced it.
The Institute lists derivation records among its architectural principles for citation-bearing legal AI, alongside keeping citation stages free of generative models and letting systems halt without confident output.
The same idea recurs across Institute frameworks: the opposition board logs every proposal, adoption, rejection and override, and the completeness protocol ends in a dated search log. Trust, on this view, is a property of a process, and a process leaves a record; a stamp at the end leaves only a stamp.
Related terms
Related frameworks
The Four Laws of System Design for Computational Law
A legal AI system must never overstate its confidence, must explain every output, must ground every legal proposition in validated authority, and must keep its reasoning components testable and versioned, with each law yielding to the laws above it.
Pre-Filing Completeness Protocol
Research is complete enough to file when every element of every claim at issue has its governing standard, controlling authority, record support, adverse-authority check and rejected-argument check recorded, and every one of those cells ends in a citation or a logged search that found nothing.
Counter-Model Builder
An opposition system succeeds when it hands the court a complete, record-grounded replacement for the movant's proposed order, not a list of objections filed under the movant's headings.