How can I tell whether a workflow is a true escalation case?

A workflow is worth treating as an escalation case when most of the following are present in the material you are reviewing.

- A written or tabulated authority limit that differs by role or level - A trigger that can be checked, such as exposure, exception type or policy breach - A referral step that records who referred, to whom, and why - A handover note carrying a recommendation and supporting evidence - More than one possible outcome: approve, decline, approve with conditions, return for information - A state change in the case record after the senior decision - Follow-up work created for the original reviewer or a downstream team

If a dataset has only final decisions and no referral or authority structure, it is a decision dataset rather than an escalation dataset. Models trained on it will learn outcomes but not the point at which a reviewer should stop and hand over.

Ask for the trigger and the handover separately, because they fail in different ways: a model can detect the trigger correctly and still write a poor handover. Material that lets you score each one on its own gives you more to work with than a single pass or fail.