A citation is not decoration. It is the path back to the basis for the sentence beside it — and it should still be walkable a month later, by someone who was not there when the work was done.
01Brown & Brown, Inc. v. Johnson25 N.Y.3d 364Controlling
02BDO Seidman v. Hirshberg93 N.Y.2d 382Controlling
03Employment Agreement § 8.2Matter fileIn context
Supporting passage “Courts must examine the particular facts and circumstances giving context to the agreement...”Brown & Brown, 25 N.Y.3d at 370.
THE PRODUCT PRINCIPLE
The citation is not decoration. It is the path back to the legal basis for the work.
The research surface is built to expose source type, jurisdiction, date, weight and the precise passage in its context, so a lawyer can test the authority before relying on the proposition. Where that chain cannot yet be completed, the product says so rather than filling the gap.
Bring your own record under control
Before any external provider is connected, the sources that matter most are the ones the matter already contains. Those are handled today.
Private, signed uploads
Matter documents are stored privately, reached through short-lived signed access and checked for integrity. They are not served from a public bucket.
Text extraction
Plain text, Markdown, DOCX and PDF are extracted on the server and broken into passages, with the processing state visible at each stage. Native extraction runs first; a scanned page falls through to OCR where that service is configured.
Firm knowledge
Upload the precedents, templates and internal guidance the work should follow, kept separate from matter files and selected deliberately.
Explicit context selection
You choose which documents enter a request. There is no silent retrieval deciding on your behalf what the model has read.
Inspect before you rely
The test of a research tool is whether it makes verification faster than doing the research again. The interface is built around the passage, not the summary.
The passage, in context
Open the supporting text where it sits in the document rather than as a floating quotation with no surroundings.
Source type and weight
Distinguish controlling from persuasive, primary from secondary, and matter evidence from published authority.
Exact-passage grounding
Structured review runs record the specific passage behind each extracted value, so a finding can be checked against the page it came from.
Attorney verification is the gate
No output is presented as verified. The reviewing attorney remains the person who confirms that the authority says what the draft claims.
What the public-source layer does not replace
GovInfo, Federal Register and Wex provide useful public-source discovery, but they do not equal comprehensive licensed research or a citator. The product names that boundary instead of hiding it.
No commercial case-law database
The workspace can search selected official public services, but it is not connected to a comprehensive commercial case-law provider.
No claimed partnerships
Third-party research providers named anywhere on this site describe integration architecture. No commercial relationship is implied or in place.
No vector-search claim
Document passages are retrieved lexically today. We do not describe this as semantic or embedding-based search, because it is not.
No citator or treatment signal
Public-source results do not determine negative treatment, controlling weight or completeness. Those remain attorney verification tasks.
IN PRACTICE
The work lawyers bring to it.
Read the agreement that governs
Put the executed contract in scope and work from its actual language instead of from a recollection of its terms.
Check a draft against its sources
Walk each proposition in a draft back to the document passage that supports it, and find the ones that have nothing behind them.
Build the matter's source record
Assemble the documents a matter depends on in one place, with processing state visible, so the next person inherits the record.
Apply the firm's own precedent
Select the internal precedent the work should follow, so the draft starts from the house position rather than a generic form.
Separate evidence from authority
Keep matter exhibits and published law distinguishable in the record, so a reviewer can see which is doing the work.
HOW THE WORK MOVES
A visible record from input to review.
01Add matter documents
02Extraction and passages
03Select what enters context
04Inspect the passage
05Carry it into the draft
06Attorney verification
IN THE WORKSPACE TODAY
What you can use now.
Not yet available: Comprehensive U.S. legal search and citator; Scanned-PDF OCR.
Private document upload and storage
Signed access, integrity checks and owner-scoped storage.
Live
Extraction for TXT, Markdown, DOCX and PDF
Server-side extraction and lexical chunking with explicit processing states.
Live
Firm-knowledge library and context selection
Upload private firm material and choose what enters each request.
Live
Exact-passage grounding in review runs
Structured review records the passage behind each extracted value.
Live
Public-source records and citation linking
Opt-in GovInfo and Federal Register records persist with source markers; Wex is separately labeled as secondary.
Live
Astra for Law
Legal model integration coming soon
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PRIVATE BETA
Keep the research visible. Keep the document yours.