Other · Knowledge Management
Precedent metadata and version-control standard (for people and AI retrieval)
A field-by-field metadata standard for firm precedents, covering status, jurisdiction, authorities and their currency, licence and provenance, confidentiality, AI-assisted flags, approver and review dates, with rules that AI retrieval tools must follow.
- Kind
- Other. A precedent that fits none of the other kinds.
- Where it applies
- Australia
- AI use
- Green AI can do most of the drafting. A lawyer still reviews the result.
- Law stated as at
- 17 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked against the cited sources on 17 October 2026.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use when setting up or cleaning a precedent bank, migrating it to a new system, or connecting it to AI search or agents. Pair it with the review and approval procedure, which decides when the fields change.
How AI may be used
AI may tag and classify legacy precedents against this standard, suggest values and find gaps. People confirm status, approver, licence and confidentiality fields, which control what AI tools may retrieve.
AI may
- Suggest practice area, document type, jurisdiction and keywords for legacy precedents, for the knowledge editor to confirm.
- Extract cited authorities into the authorities field and flag citations that look outdated.
- Run validation checks and list records with missing or invalid fields.
AI must not
- Must not set status to "approved", or fill the approver, licence or confidentiality fields, without human confirmation.
- Must not retrieve records whose status is not "approved" or whose restrictions exclude AI use.
- Must not infer that a document is free of client information because the field is blank.
The lawyer checks
- Licence and provenance fields are correct for every third-party-derived precedent.
- Confidentiality and client-derived fields are reviewed before a precedent is exposed to AI retrieval.
- Review-by dates reflect how fast the area changes.
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
More in Knowledge Management
- Precedent review and approval procedure (including AI-drafted and AI-updated precedents)
- AI prompt library governance policy (prompt templates linked to precedents and tasks)
- Knowledge-base content licensing and copyright checklist (before AI ingestion)
- Matter close-out know-how capture form with confidentiality scrub
- AI knowledge assistant governance and source-citation policy (permission-aware search, information barriers, citations)
All precedents for Knowledge Management · Tasks and AI use in this area