A headnote is a publisher-written editorial summary attached to a legal opinion. It is not part of the court’s official decision and should be treated as secondary material, not source text.
In cyber security and AI governance, that distinction matters because headnotes often carry their own copyright and licensing rules. If a team ingests legal documents for search, analytics, or model training, mixing headnotes with the underlying opinion can create provenance errors, compliance failures, and unnecessary legal exposure. Secure data pipelines should label headnotes separately, track their source, and enforce rights checks before ingestion.