A chat box asks what you want to say. An assignment asks what the work has to produce. Set the objective, the jurisdiction, the sources in scope and the deliverable before a single line of analysis is written.
Prepare a supported argument against enforcement of § 8.2.
Objective
Oppose preliminary injunction
Jurisdiction
New York · Second Circuit
Output
Argument section with authorities
ASTRA PLAN
1Frame issues
2Search controlling law
3Test contrary authority
4Apply matter facts
5Draft into document
THE PRODUCT PRINCIPLE
A legal assistant should understand the assignment before it starts producing prose.
Astra for Law structures the request around the matter rather than around the conversation. The attorney defines the question and its constraints, the workspace shows how the work is progressing, and the result lands in an editable document instead of a transcript.
Frame the work before it starts
Most disappointing output is a framing failure. The assignment surface asks for the things a supervising attorney would have asked for anyway.
Objective and deliverable
State what the work must produce — a memorandum, an argument section, a client letter — so the response is shaped as work product rather than as commentary.
Jurisdiction and posture
Fix the governing law and the procedural position, so the analysis is not written for a jurisdiction that does not apply to the matter.
Explicit source scope
Choose which uploaded matter documents and which private firm-knowledge files enter the request. Nothing is pulled into context that you did not select.
Matter instructions
A request opened inside a matter inherits that matter's standing instructions, so the constraints do not have to be restated each time.
Watch the work arrive, and interrupt it
A response that appears all at once cannot be supervised. The workspace streams the answer and leaves the attorney in control of the run.
Streamed response
Text arrives progressively through the Responses API, so a wrong direction is visible in the first sentences instead of after the full answer.
Stop mid-run
Cancel a request that has gone the wrong way without waiting for it to finish or discarding the session.
Retry a request
Re-run a request that failed, or that you want answered again, from the authenticated home without retyping the assignment.
Conversations that persist
Requests, replies and their work product are stored against your account and are there at the next sign-in — not held in browser memory.
Turn the answer into the document
The response is a step, not the deliverable. Every path out of the assistant leads into an editable legal document.
Act on selected text
Select a passage in the document and ask for a rewrite, a tightening, an expansion or a different register, without leaving the page.
Proposals, never silent edits
Anything the model wants to change arrives as a marked proposal with accept and reject controls. Your text does not change until you say so.
Suggestions that survive the session
A pending suggestion is stored server-side and is still waiting when you return, applied against the document version it was written for.
Usage in view
Each request records its tokens and an estimated cost against a daily allowance, so the economics of a long research session are never a surprise.
IN PRACTICE
The work lawyers bring to it.
Open a question with constraints
Ask whether a covenant survives under a named state's law, with the executed agreement already in scope and the output fixed as a memorandum.
Interrogate an uploaded document
Put an executed agreement in context and ask for every restrictive covenant, every notice obligation, or every defined term that is used but never defined.
Pressure-test a position
Ask for the strongest argument against the conclusion you have drafted, then keep the useful half and reject the rest.
Rewrite for the reader
Take a paragraph written for a partner and ask for the version that goes to the client, with the hedging intact and the vocabulary changed.
Resume last week's matter
Reopen the conversation where the research stopped, with the sources, the instructions and the draft still attached to it.
Draft the first pass
Turn a settled analysis into a structured first draft in the document editor, then do the work of making it yours.
HOW THE WORK MOVES
A visible record from input to review.
01Frame the assignment
02Choose source scope
03Review the response as it streams
04Inspect what it relies on
05Draft into work product
06Attorney review
IN THE WORKSPACE TODAY
What you can use now.
Not yet available: A legal-specific OpenAI model.
Streaming responses and cancellation
Requests stream through the OpenAI Responses API and can be stopped mid-run.
Live
Persistent conversations and history
Conversations, messages and work product are stored per account under row-level security.
Live
Selected-text actions and proposals
Rewrite, shorten and expand a selection; changes arrive as accept/reject proposals.
Live
Daily limits, usage ledger and cost estimates
Every request writes tokens and an estimated cost against a daily allowance.
Live
Limited official public retrieval
Opt-in searches use GovInfo court records and Federal Register material; Wex remains a labeled secondary reference.
Live
Astra for Law
Legal model integration coming soon
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PRIVATE BETA
Keep the research visible. Keep the document yours.