34 backfilled contracts carry a legal_owner, and is_backfilled says on the same row that no review ever happened #53

Found while measuring #47. ⚠️ This is a semantics question, not a defect report: one of the two readings below is right and the fixture currently asserts the other without saying so.

Measured

claude/issue-47-seed-legal-owner, from the compiled artifact:

contracts with a legal_owner            68
  of those, is_backfilled = true        34
  of those 34, review_started_at        null  (all 34)

So a third of the corpus carries a named lawyer on a row that also says, in its own columns, that nobody ever reviewed it.

The contradiction, in the declarations' own words

• clm_contract.legal_owner, src/objects/contract.object.ts: description "The lawyer who accepted the review. Required before a submitted contract enters review."
• clm_contract.is_backfilled, DESIGN.md §13 Q8: 补录的已签合同 — an already-executed contract entered after the fact, which starts active and skipped review and approval. src/data/plan-contracts.ts says the same at length: the backfilled population "claims nothing they do not have … no submitted_at, no review_started_at, no approved_at, no review, no deviation and no signature round".
• F16 (executed_upload) is the action that produces such a contract in the running app, and it assigns no legal owner.

The fixture's rule is hasLegalOwner = pastSubmission && type.requiresLegalReview && status !== 'submitted', which does not consult backfilled. That is why the two claims sit on the same row.

The two readings, and what each costs

• A. legal_owner means "the lawyer who accepted the review". Then a backfilled contract must not carry one, and hasLegalOwner gains && !backfilled. ⚠️ Cost, and it is real: DESIGN.md §10 draws the expiring corpus from the backfilled contracts, so those 34 rows are precisely F12 renewal_notice and F13 expiration_sweep's population. Both copy legal_owner beside owner_id, so every renewal and expiry notice would drop from two recipients to one — the opposite direction from The demo makes M3's reminder layer look broken: 54 of 120 contracts have no legal_owner, so four of six scheduled jobs notify nobody #47.
• B. legal_owner means "the lawyer who owns this file in legal". Then the data is right and the field description is what is wrong, and it should say so — custodianship, with the review-acceptance sentence demoted to how the column is normally first written.

B is the cheaper answer and, for a records-keeping product, arguably the truer one: a backfilled contract still has somebody in legal responsible for it. But that is a product decision about what a column means, not a developer's, and either way something has to change so the row stops asserting both.

Not urgent, and ⛔ not a rider

Nothing measured is broken: no gate, no flow and no screen misbehaves. It is on the "places the product lies" list from #45 — a column that says one thing while the column next to it says the opposite — which is why it is filed rather than left in a PR body.

Related

#47 (where this was measured; it deals this column but deliberately does not change WHICH rows carry it) · #39 / PR #42 (F12/F13, and F16 which creates backfilled contracts) · #45 (the dogfood pass and its "places the product lies" category) · DESIGN.md §13 Q8