Build a review-ready legal inventory

1903. Lesson identity

Lesson ID

lesson-s4-4-14-02-build-a-review-ready-legal-inventory

Module

4.14 — Legal basics

Lesson title

Build a review-ready legal inventory

Academic type

Workflow

Schema type

Mixed

Order

2 of the module

Estimated time

40–55 minutes, including practice

This lesson teaches documentation and escalation. It does not provide legal advice or determine whether a use is lawful.

1904. Learning objective

After this lesson, you can create an asset-and-obligation inventory that records provenance, intended use, evidence, uncertainty, and escalation needs without making legal conclusions.

1905. Why this matters

A qualified reviewer can only assess the facts that the team has identified and documented. An incomplete inventory hides missing permissions, attribution requirements, notice obligations, and contractual constraints. A structured record also lets an AI assistant help with organization without allowing it to invent rights or replace professional review. The result is a clear handoff rather than an unsupported approval.

1906. Prior knowledge

You should already be able to distinguish a legal question from a technical or product question, as practiced in Spot the legal question. You should also be able to identify the asset or activity being questioned and state its intended use in concrete terms. This lesson assumes no legal training.

1907. Core concept

A legal inventory is a fact-and-evidence register, not a verdict. Each entry should separate four things:

1. What exists: the asset, service, agreement, person, or activity being recorded.
2. What the team wants to do: the intended use, audience, territory, platform, duration, and distribution context when known.
3. What supports that use: source, owner or provider, license, contract, permission, attribution text, receipt, terms version, or other evidence.
4. What remains unresolved: missing facts, conflicting terms, possible obligations, and questions that require qualified review.

Use neutral language such as “permission evidence not located” or “scope requires review.” Do not write “cleared,” “safe,” “legal,” or “illegal” unless that conclusion has been formally supplied by an appropriately qualified reviewer.

1908. Mental model

Use the TRACE record for every inventory item:

Add a source reference and exactly one documentation status to each record. Use this normalized taxonomy consistently; the status is a single-valued description of the documentation state, not the legal result:

• Evidence collected: relevant source material is attached or referenced.
• Evidence incomplete: some material is missing or cannot be verified.
• Needs qualified review: the facts or terms require legal interpretation.
• Decision recorded: a qualified reviewer has supplied a documented direction.

Do not combine statuses in the status field. For example, write Evidence incomplete as the status and record “confirm commercial-use scope” separately in Escalation. A record may need qualified review while still having Evidence incomplete as its one documentation status; the Escalation field captures the action or question. Use the same four labels in every record: Evidence collected, Evidence incomplete, Needs qualified review, or Decision recorded.

1909. Concrete example

Suppose a team plans to use a sound effect downloaded from an online asset library. A review-ready entry might look like this:

Notice what the entry does not say: it does not call the sound effect cleared, royalty-free, or safe. It gives a reviewer a defined object, an intended use, evidence to inspect, and specific questions to answer. The status records the state of the documentation; the escalation field records the unresolved review request.

1910. AI-native workflow

AI can help normalize records, identify blank fields, and group similar escalation questions. It must not decide ownership, interpret ambiguous terms as approval, or fabricate provenance.

Protect sensitive information before using an AI tool. Do not paste personal data, private contact details, payment information, confidential contract text, unreleased evidence, or identifiable voice or identity information unless the tool and the project have explicitly authorized that handling. Minimize and redact inputs where possible, preserve original documents in the approved project location, and use placeholders such as [ARTIST NAME] or [CONTRACT DATE] for organizational work. If authorization or the tool's data handling is unclear, do not submit the material; escalate that handling question separately.

Use this controlled sequence:

1. Provide bounded facts: give the assistant only the records and source notes you have actually collected, after applying the sensitive-data boundary.
2. Request structure, not judgment: ask it to map each record to Thing, Request, Attribution and authority, Conditions, and Escalation.
3. Mark uncertainty explicitly: require labels such as “not provided,” “unverified,” or “requires review” instead of guesses.
4. Compare against the source: check every extracted condition and citation against the original evidence.
5. Assign one status and preserve separation: apply the ordered decision rule—Decision recorded, otherwise Evidence incomplete, otherwise Needs qualified review, otherwise Evidence collected—and keep escalation questions in the Escalation field rather than combining them with the status.
6. Escalate the record: send unresolved interpretation questions, including data-handling questions, to a qualified reviewer.

A useful instruction is: “Organize these supplied, redacted facts into the TRACE fields. Do not infer permission, ownership, compliance, or legal status. Mark missing evidence and phrase unresolved points as questions for qualified review. Return one documentation status per record and keep escalation questions separate. Do not request or reproduce sensitive personal or confidential information.”

1911. Common mistake

The most dangerous mistake is treating a complete-looking spreadsheet as proof of clearance, or using several status labels as though they were one status. A row containing an asset name, URL, and license label may still omit the applicable terms version, intended distribution context, attribution duty, or permission from the actual rights holder. Documentation quality improves review; it does not replace review. A second mistake is sending private contracts or identifying information to an AI tool merely because the information would make the record easier to complete.

1912. Guided practice

Create three inventory entries from these fictional production facts:

• A character portrait was commissioned from a freelance artist, but the agreement is stored separately and the intended distribution scope is not obvious from the invoice.
• A font was downloaded from a website whose page displays a license link, but the team has not saved the linked terms.
• A team member recorded a voice line and proposes using it in the game; no written release or usage record has been added to the project documentation.

For each entry:

1. Name the thing precisely. Check whether the supplied facts indicate an age-related consideration, trademark, or open-source component. If they do not, record “not indicated by the supplied facts” rather than speculating.
2. Describe the intended use without claiming approval.
3. List the evidence currently available.
4. Record missing facts or possible obligations.
5. Write one or more questions for qualified review.
6. Assign exactly one documentation status by applying the ordered rule: select Decision recorded if qualified direction is documented; otherwise select Evidence incomplete if identified source material is missing or unverified; otherwise select Needs qualified review if a specific interpretation question remains; otherwise select Evidence collected. Keep the escalation question in its own field; do not write a combined status such as “Evidence incomplete; needs qualified review.”
7. If you use AI to organize your fictional entries, do not add real names, contact details, contract text, payment information, or identifiable recordings. Use placeholders and verify the output against your notes.

Make one deliberate decision: choose which entry should be escalated first and justify the priority using uncertainty, potential scope, or the difficulty of obtaining missing evidence—not a legal conclusion.

1913. Validation / evidence

Your work is ready for handoff when it contains:

• Three distinct records with unambiguous asset or activity names.
• A separate intended-use description for each record.
• A source or evidence reference, or an explicit statement that evidence is missing.
• Conditions and obligations written as documented facts or review questions.
• Exactly one documentation status per record, selected by applying the ordered rule; the evidence supporting that selection is visible, and escalation questions are recorded separately.
• No unsupported labels such as “cleared,” “legal,” “illegal,” or “safe.”
• A documentation status and an escalation question for every unresolved entry, plus a submission record when Needs qualified review is assigned.
• No unauthorized sensitive or confidential information supplied to an AI tool.
• A reasoned priority for the first escalation.

A qualified reviewer should be able to identify what to inspect and what the team is asking without reconstructing the facts from informal messages. If the supplied facts indicate an age-related consideration, trademark question, or open-source obligation, surface it as a separate record or escalation item; otherwise record that it is not indicated by the supplied facts.

1914. Key takeaways

• A legal inventory organizes facts and evidence; it does not deliver a legal conclusion.
• Record the intended use separately from the asset’s source and permission evidence.
• Use the ordered decision rule to select exactly one documentation status per record; keep unresolved questions in the separate Escalation field.
• Do not submit sensitive personal or confidential information to an AI tool without explicit authorization; redact and minimize instead.
• AI is useful for normalization and gap detection when it is prohibited from guessing.

1915. Next lesson

This inventory now hands off explicitly to canonical module 4.15 — Budgets. Preserve the TRACE records, source references, documentation statuses, and escalation questions so the budget work can account for review needs, attribution or notice work, replacement costs, and other documented dependencies without turning the inventory into legal advice.

1916. Knowledge check