Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms used across the Juris platform — for compliance officers, risk leaders, regulators, and anyone evaluating whether their decisions can be defended.
A complete, tamper-evident record of every decision made by an organisation — including the inputs received, the rule version applied, the reasoning followed, and the human who approved it. In a Juris-governed environment, the audit trail is generated automatically as a by-product of the decision itself, rather than reconstructed afterwards from emails and spreadsheets.
A decision that can be proven, after the fact, to have followed the policy that was in force at the moment it was made. Certification means three things at once: the rule was current, the inputs were valid, and the output is reproducible. A certified decision is the unit of accountability in a Juris-governed organisation.
An approach in which regulatory requirements are encoded into decision logic upfront, rather than checked retrospectively by an auditor. Compliance-by-design treats the policy and the executable rule as the same artefact, so the organisation cannot drift out of compliance without the system noticing.
Juris's category of software. A CRS treats an organisation's written policies as a versioned constitution and uses that constitution to govern every decision the organisation makes — proving, for each one, that the right rule was applied to the right inputs by the right authority. Distinct from a rules engine (which executes logic without governing it) and from a workflow tool (which routes work without certifying outcomes).
The recorded answer to the question "who is allowed to decide this?" for any given case. In a Juris-governed organisation, decision authority is data — bound to the rule, the case type, and the person — rather than tribal knowledge. It is the precondition for delegation that does not collapse under audit.
The act of proving that a specific decision followed a specific version of a specific policy. Certification produces a signed receipt that pairs the decision with the rule, the inputs, the authority, and the timestamp — so the decision can be defended to a regulator, an internal auditor, or a court without re-litigating the underlying judgement.
The slow divergence between what an organisation's policy says it does and what its decisions actually look like in practice. Drift is rarely intentional; it accumulates from small discretionary calls, undocumented exceptions, and policy changes that never made it into operational systems. Juris treats drift as a measurable, monitorable quantity rather than an unavoidable cost of complexity.
The append-only record of every decision a Juris-governed system has made — its inputs, the rule version applied, the authority who signed off, the output, and the time. The decision log is the substrate on which drift detection, audit, and incident reconstruction operate.
Continuous, automated comparison of the decisions an organisation is making against the policy it claims to follow. When the two diverge — a credit officer approves loans the policy would have refused, a compliance reviewer waves through cases the rule should flag — drift detection surfaces the gap before a regulator does.
The property that, for any decision the system has made, a human reviewer can reconstruct why — which rule was applied, which inputs were used, which clauses fired, and which were skipped. Juris treats explainability as a structural property of the decision, not an after-the-fact narrative.
The codification of expert judgement — the kind that lives in a senior underwriter's head — into rules that survive that person's retirement. Juris distinguishes knowledge preservation from automation: the goal is not to remove the expert, but to make their reasoning replicable by their successors.
The forensic process of reconstructing the actual decision logic an organisation is using — by analysing historical decisions, interviewing experts, and reading the policy as written — so that the unwritten rules can be made explicit. Discovery is the first step in any Juris engagement: you cannot certify what you cannot see.
The principle that the authoritative version of a policy should be machine-executable, not a Word document that humans paraphrase into a system. Policy-as-code collapses the gap between the rule the lawyers wrote and the rule the software runs. Juris extends this idea by adding versioning, certification, and audit on top.
The capability of changing a rule, a threshold, or an authority in a Juris-governed system with confidence that the change has been tested against historical cases, that the new behaviour is captured in a new constitution version, and that the previous version remains available for any decision made under it. Safe change is what makes a banking-grade system actually safe to evolve.
The judgement, intuition, and pattern-recognition that experienced practitioners use without being able to articulate it on demand. Tacit knowledge is the dark matter of decision-making: it shapes outcomes invisibly, walks out the door at retirement, and rarely makes it into formal policy. Logic discovery is Juris's tool for surfacing it.
The set of rules an organisation is governed by, treated as code: every change is a new version, every version is signed, and every decision is tagged with the version it was made under. The constitution is what allows you to ask, three years later, "what rule was in force the day this decision was made?" — and to get a clean answer.
Read the white papers — or talk to us about your specific decisions and the policies behind them.