The glossary
The litigation record, defined.
The terms you hit while working a case file — defined in plain English, with how each one actually plays in practice. New entries publish weekly.
Litigation terms
The working vocabulary of discovery, depositions, and trial.
Attorney-client privilege
Attorney-client privilege protects confidential communications between a client and their lawyer made for the purpose of seeking or giving legal advice — the oldest and strongest of the evidentiary privileges.
Bates numbering
Bates numbering is the practice of stamping every page of produced documents with a unique sequential identifier, so any page can be cited, tracked, and retrieved unambiguously across a case.
Business records exception
The business records exception admits records made and kept in the ordinary course of a regularly conducted activity as an exception to the hearsay rule — the doorway through which most documentary evidence enters trial.
Deposition designation
A deposition designation is a party's formal selection of the portions of deposition testimony — by page and line — to be offered as evidence at trial, met by the other side's counter-designations and objections.
Errata sheet
An errata sheet is the document a deponent uses after reviewing their deposition transcript to record corrections — from typographical fixes to, controversially, substantive changes to testimony.
Hearsay
Hearsay is an out-of-court statement offered in evidence to prove the truth of what it asserts — presumptively inadmissible, but riddled with exclusions and exceptions that decide what a jury actually hears.
Interrogatories
Interrogatories are written questions served on another party in litigation that must be answered in writing, under oath, within a set time — one of the core written-discovery tools alongside document requests and requests for admission.
Leading question
A leading question is one that suggests its own answer — "You never saw the contract, did you?" — prohibited on direct examination of your own witness, and the entire engine of cross-examination.
Litigation hold
A litigation hold is the directive an organization issues — once litigation is reasonably anticipated — suspending routine document destruction and instructing custodians to preserve potentially relevant material.
Meet and confer
Meet and confer is the required good-faith negotiation between counsel before bringing a discovery dispute to the court — the procedural gate that turns deficient responses into motions to compel.
Motion in limine
A motion in limine is a pretrial motion asking the court to rule on the admissibility of evidence before trial begins — typically to keep prejudicial material from ever reaching the jury's ears.
Prior inconsistent statement
A prior inconsistent statement is an earlier statement by a witness that conflicts with their current testimony — the primary tool for impeaching credibility, and in some circumstances admissible as substantive evidence.
Privilege log
A privilege log is the itemized list a producing party must serve identifying each document withheld from discovery on privilege grounds — with enough detail to let the other side test the claim without revealing the protected content.
Request for production
A request for production is a written discovery demand that another party produce documents, electronically stored information, or tangible things for inspection — the mechanism through which most of a case file comes into existence.
Spoliation
Spoliation is the destruction, alteration, or failure to preserve evidence that a party knew or should have known was relevant to litigation — sanctionable conduct that can cost a case regardless of its merits.
Subpoena duces tecum
A subpoena duces tecum is a court-backed command that a witness produce documents or records — "bring with you," in the Latin — as distinct from a subpoena that merely compels testimony.
Summary judgment
Summary judgment is a ruling that decides a claim without trial because no genuine dispute of material fact exists and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law — making it the moment a case's factual record faces its first real test.
Voir dire
Voir dire is the questioning process used to test suitability before someone is empaneled or heard — most commonly jury selection, but also the examination of a witness or expert outside the jury's presence.
Work-product doctrine
The work-product doctrine shields materials prepared in anticipation of litigation from discovery — with near-absolute protection for a lawyer's mental impressions and only qualified protection for everything else.
Medical records, for legal readers
What the chart actually says — for the people reading it under deadline.
Activities of daily living (ADLs)
Activities of daily living are the basic self-care tasks — bathing, dressing, eating, transferring, toileting, continence — that clinicians assess to measure functional independence, and that damages arguments are built from.
Aggravation of a preexisting condition
Aggravation of a preexisting condition is the legal theory that an incident worsened a condition the claimant already had — compensable in most jurisdictions, but only to the extent of the worsening, which makes the medical baseline the whole fight.
Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS)
The Glasgow Coma Scale is the standard 3-to-15 score for level of consciousness after head trauma, built from eye-opening, verbal, and motor responses — and one of the first numbers a legal reader should find in any brain-injury file.
History and physical (H&P)
The history and physical is the comprehensive intake document of a hospital admission — the patient's account of the present illness and past history plus a full examination — and usually the single densest page-range in a medical file.
ICD-10 code
ICD-10 codes are the standardized diagnosis codes attached to every billed medical encounter — a machine-readable layer of the chart that tells a litigation reader what each provider diagnosed, visit by visit.
Independent medical examination (IME)
An independent medical examination is a physical or mental examination of a claimant by a doctor selected — and paid — by the opposing party or insurer, typically to test the claimed injuries, causation, and need for treatment.
Maximum medical improvement (MMI)
Maximum medical improvement is the point at which a patient's condition has stabilized and no further significant recovery is expected — the milestone that triggers impairment ratings and reshapes settlement posture in injury and workers' compensation cases.
PRN
PRN — from the Latin pro re nata, "as the situation demands" — is chart shorthand for medication or treatment taken as needed rather than on a fixed schedule.
Range of motion (ROM)
Range of motion is the measured arc through which a joint moves — recorded in degrees, compared against normal values, and one of the few injury findings in a chart that is quantified rather than described.
SOAP note
A SOAP note is the standard format for clinical documentation — Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan — and the structure behind most of the progress notes in a medical record.
Status post (s/p)
Status post — abbreviated s/p in charts — means "following" or "in the state after" a procedure or event: "s/p L4-L5 fusion" marks a patient's history as after that surgery.
Treatment gap
A treatment gap is an unexplained break in a claimant's medical care — a stretch with no visits between the injury and later treatment — that defense teams read as evidence the injury was minor, resolved, or unrelated.
WNL
WNL is medical-chart shorthand for "within normal limits" — a finding examined and judged normal. Its dark-humor alternate reading, "we never looked," is the caution: WNL records a conclusion, not the underlying data.