Reliance lane / counsel
For in-house counsel
You will be asked to defend a decision your organization cannot fully explain, made by a system it did not build, on a timeline set by someone else.
The call you have already imagined
A regulator opens an inquiry, or a claimant files, or a board member asks a question in writing, and the subject is a decision made months ago by a process that includes an AI system.
You ask what happened, and what comes back is a policy, an org chart, a vendor's log export, and three people with partial recollection.
The policy says a human reviewed it, but nothing establishes that a human did, on this one, or what they were shown when they did.
The exposure is not that the decision was wrong, because decisions are wrong sometimes and that is survivable.
The exposure is that you cannot establish who authorized it, on what basis, or under what constraint, and unexplainable is a worse posture than defensible and imperfect.
Why reconstruction fails you specifically
Reconstruction happens under the worst possible conditions: adversarially, on someone else's clock, from records held in a third party's custody under a contract you may not have negotiated.
Three problems compound.
Custody
The evidence sits with a vendor, and availability, retention, format, and export are governed by terms written for commercial convenience rather than for a matter.
Interest
The party producing the record has its own exposure in how it reads, which does not make the record false but does make it contestable, and contested reconstruction is where matters get expensive.
Time
Logs designed for operations get rotated, truncated, or migrated, so the window you need has often closed before you knew you would need it.
What changes when authorization is recorded contemporaneously
We issue signed, tamper-evident records of individual governed decisions, where tamper-evident means later alteration is detectable by anyone holding the record.
Each is created at the moment of the decision rather than assembled afterward, and its origin can be verified without depending on a third party's continued cooperation.
Custody moves to your organization
The record is yours, so retention, disclosure, and production are decisions you make rather than requests you file.
Authorization is fixed at the time it occurred
What was done, what was decided, and who stood behind it exists as a contemporaneous artifact rather than a later account of one.
The record survives the technology
A model change, a vendor substitution, or a platform withdrawal does not erase how the organization was operating before it, and continuity of evidence across a change is often the exact period an inquiry concentrates on.
Human oversight becomes demonstrable
Regimes that require meaningful human involvement, including the human-oversight obligations in the EU AI Act for high-risk uses, ask for something more than an assertion that a review policy existed.
We describe properties of the artifact, and we do not predict how any tribunal or regulator will treat it, and nothing here is legal advice.
Where this sits relative to privilege
The record is an operational business artifact created in the ordinary course, not work product and not a communication with counsel.
That is a feature, because it means the evidence exists whether or not a matter arises, without you having to decide early whether to build a record and how to characterize it later.
Privilege strategy stays entirely yours, applied to your own analysis of the artifact rather than to the artifact itself.
For outside counsel
Firms come to us from the other direction, usually mid-matter, when the reconstruction is already underway and the gaps are visible.
The more useful engagement is earlier, because clients who adopt this before an inquiry are materially easier to represent, and the recommendation carries more weight coming from the firm that will have to argue the file.
Bring us a decision you would have to defend.
Start a conversation
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