Your practice is already written down.

You, first.

A professional's expertise is already substantially explicit, because the obligation to write it down came with the work. An engineer's practice is the first case in the record for that reason: the calculations were checked, the reports issued, the specifications stamped, the job files kept. The knowledge is in the paper, and the paper is in your office.

• The retiring expert. A career of practice, and a shelf about to become a storage problem rather than a working reference.
• The firm losing a principal. The person who answered the hard questions is going, and the answers leave with them.
• The estate of a practice. A practice closed, its files intact, nobody left who reads them.
• An owner-principal. Your own firm, your own files, and a decision to make about what becomes of them.

A company's records come second, built the same way. A business's back office — estimating, project controls, safety and compliance, the rest of the Office sector — is a records practice too, filed on the same track with the company as the Source.

Two routes, and the second one is yours to refuse.

Step zero is an inventory. You declare what the body of records is; it is checked against your declaration; a dated statement of what was in it is issued and sealed. A later change is detectable, and you can always answer what you handed over. Even Steven holds that statement with your consent.

Records mining comes first. The converter reads the body of paper you bring and turns it into a reference. The reference answers with named sources: which document an answer came from, and where in it. Where your records do not support an answer it refuses, and the refusal is the working part of it. Every output carries a receipt.

Ratify comes second. From that same paper the agent drafts method statements — the way you do a thing. You accept it, amend it, or decline it. Each ratified statement is authored and dated, so the reference carries your judgment rather than an inference about it.

You are not asked to sit for anything. The paper goes in as it stands. Seat time on a machine is the Hands track: a different road, with different paper.

The written-down-able kind.

A records reference captures the knowledge that can be written down: the kind that would take too long to write out in full, and the kind you do without noticing you are doing it.

It does not capture the somatic kind — what your hands do faster than words follow — nor the collective kind, which lives between the people in a firm rather than inside any one of them. Those are real. They are not in this.

The paper says which grade is being bought.

Who wrote it, and whose it is.

Who wrote it. A receipt says where a passage came from. It does not say who wrote it. In a practice of any size those are not the same thing, and a reference that pays one person for another's paragraph is worse than no reference at all. So authorship is recorded before any mined reference is licensed per person.

The boundary inside your files. Your own method — the calculations, the procedures, the specifications, the way the work is done — is one thing. Files that carry a client's confidence are another. In some professions the second cannot be licensed at all without every client's consent, and a licence does not cure a missing consent.

Whose files they are. This one is open, and it is put the way every open question on this site is put.

The question. When an expert has spent a career employed, whose documents are the practice files?

It is open. An employed expert's files are usually the employer's, and often the client's. No court has settled what an individual may license out of them, and nothing here asserts an answer. Licensing your own practice's files is clean for an owner-principal; in at least one profession it is known to be blocked; counsel rules the rest.

What is built. The clean case is the one this product leads with: an owner-principal licensing the files of their own practice. Where the files belong to somebody else, the Source is the company and the company signs — the second kind of Records Source.

Your agreement is with Even Steven.

Even Steven owns what is made of every skill, on every track, for the person or the company it came from. It holds your consent, pays you under that agreement, and a withdrawal is exercised there. Tacit Tessera never asks you to sign anything: it gives the skill set its number, seals its Card, licenses it, and counts every use.

You consent tier by tier, each tier its own yes, and the design gives you a view of every serve made from your records: the list you are paid against is the list you can read.

You can withdraw. On the Hands and Machine tracks the ruled timing is one sentence: It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes. On Records the unit is a serve, so a withdrawal takes effect at the next serve — your records come out of serving from that point, and what was already served went under a consent that stood at the time.

Every Even Steven agreement is still a draft for counsel. Nothing is signed and no money has moved.