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A source trail on every point

Legal work mixes what a document says, what someone claims, what you infer, and what nobody has answered. Blurring them is how a draft acquires a fact it never had.

Open a point in the review and you read the page that carries it: the document, the paragraph, the line. Nothing is a summary of a summary. Where the material is silent, the point says so instead of filling the gap.

One point, three references
A claim linked to three references A point in the draft brief sits between three references: a client statement that makes the claim, an incident report that supports it, and no call log anywhere in the reviewed material. POINT Call log, 14th in the draft brief A Client statement p. 3 · alleged R Incident report p. 12 · in the file ? No call log not in this scope

In the material Not found here

Five labels, and one rule

Every item in the review carries a label and a letter. The rule is that you can always tell what you are looking at without opening the item.

Allegation

A claim attributed to a person or a document. It is not a verified record, and it is never presented as one. Most of what arrives in a new matter is allegation, including the parts that turn out to be true.

Record

Something the material supports, with the page and location still open to inspection. Record is a claim about evidence, not about truth: two records can still contradict each other, and the contradiction is kept rather than averaged away.

Inference

A reading drawn from the material, marked as interpretation rather than fact. Inferences are useful and they are not evidence, so they carry a different label and a different visual treatment.

Unresolved

A question the reviewed material does not answer. Not a fact, and not evidence that the thing does not exist. This is the label that keeps a missing call log from reading as a call that never happened.

Restricted

A privacy or conflict hold. You see the metadata, not the contents. The label describes a state and grants nothing: clearing a hold is an attorney’s act, not a color.

Contradictions stay contradictions

Two records that cannot both be true are worth more to a reviewer than one smoothed sentence. The system keeps both, names the conflict, and leaves the resolution to the person who has to answer for it.

Two records, one conflict, no automatic winner ILLUSTRATION
Two records held as a contradiction A dispatch log and a witness statement give different durations for the same call. The conflict is held open for the reviewer rather than resolved. R Dispatch log p. 4 · in the file Call lasted 12 minutes R Witness statement p. 9 · in the file Under a minute HELD AS A CONTRADICTION the reviewer decides which record to rely on

Why letters, not just color

The five labels differ by name, by letter, and where it helps, by edge treatment. That combination is deliberate. Color alone fails in grayscale, fails for common red-green deficiencies, and fails in a printed brief, which is where a review often ends up. The letter survives all three.

Missing is not the same as absent

When the system finds nothing, it says that nothing was found in the reviewed scope. That sentence is longer than “not present,” and it is the honest one: a document nobody sent is not a fact about the case. It is a fact about the file.

A source link is only useful if it still works after the file has been re-exported, renamed, or handed to someone else. The trail is recorded against the original, so the reference points at the document that came in rather than at a working copy that may have moved on.