LegalAI[Space]

Research Agent

Multi-agent legal research that cites real authorities, never hallucinated ones

Litigation & Disputes · Employment · Compliance & Regulatory

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Research Agent · how a question becomes a memo
Your questionOrchestrator
  1. 1Plan2
  2. 2Retrieve3
  3. 3Check5
  4. 4Draft1
Four gates, in codeRecord existsQuote is verbatimMatch is strong enoughApproved source
Memo, with verdicts
01/11

Query Planner. Decomposes the question into three to eight ordered sub-questions, each tagged with jurisdiction and source class.

You hand it

  • Answer a point of law with authorities cited and verified
  • Produce a court-ready research memo with OSCOLA pinpoints
  • Check whether a case relied on in a draft is still good law

You get back

A memo with a summary, the authorities relied on with verdicts and treatment signals, open questions, and How this was made.

  • Summary
  • Files
  • Action items
  • Authorities
  • Open questions
  • How this was made

You can rely on it because

Every authority it cites is held against its source by checks that run in code, not in a model, and carries a verdict you can read before the memo.

  • Citation Match-Set
  • Quote Verbatim
  • Confidence Floor
  • Provenance Label
  • Privilege Drop
  • Closed-World URL

From the question to the memo.

The Research Agent works in passes rather than a single prompt. It plans the question, decides which class of source answers each part, retrieves from primary law and the regulators' own handbooks, runs a treatment pass over every case it relies on, reads the firm's own documents on the matter, and only then drafts. An authority arrives labelled with a treatment signal: good law, followed, applied, distinguished, explained, considered, doubted, overruled, or needs a check. A doubted or overruled authority caps the confidence of the section that relies on it.

  1. 01

    Ask the question

    Ask a research question in natural language, including matter context such as jurisdiction, practice area and urgency, and the orchestrator picks the right use case.

  2. 02

    Plan the sub-questions

    The Query Planner decomposes the query into three to eight sub-questions, and the Source Identifier maps each one to specific open-web sources, never a paywalled aggregator.

  3. 03

    Retrieve in parallel

    Case law, statutes and regulator content are fetched in parallel, one request per second per host, with robots.txt honoured.

  4. 04

    Run the treatment pass

    For every cited case, an independent treatment-research pass runs on open-web sources, with citing-case evidence behind each signal.

  5. 05

    Draft the memo

    Synthesis & Drafting assembles the use-case-specific artefact: a memo, a comparative table, a regulatory brief or a litigation playbook.

  6. 06

    Gate the output

    Citation Verification re-fetches and quote-matches every citation, Research Confidence Scoring applies the floor rules, and Citation Style Formatter sets the citation style, before the memo reaches you.

A document with its working attached.

A memo with a summary, the authorities relied on with verdicts and treatment signals, open questions, and How this was made.
Matters · 14 Rowan Court, Flat 9 · ResearchSources ranked
Matter: 14 Rowan CourtEngland and WalesResearch Agent
 
Prepare for: Court-Ready · Deliver as: Word

Where we looked

  • 1Your documentsLease, demand, correspondence
  • 2Primary law3 statutes, 1 judgment
  • 3Regulators and the recordNothing needed
  • 4Web searchOff for this question

Authorities · 4

  • 1

    Law of Property Act 1925, s 146

    c 20
    not yet checked
  • 2

    Housing Act 1996, s 81

    c 52
    not yet checked
  • 3

    Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, s 168

    c 15
    not yet checked
  • 4

    Escalus Properties Ltd v Robinson

    [1996] QB 231 (CA)
    not yet checked

Three tasks to start with.

The prompts the agent suggests inside the workspace. Paste your own document under any of them.

  • Check an authority is still good law

    Check whether the following authority is still good law, and summarise how it has been treated since. Give me the citation signal, the citing cases, and a two-line answer I can put in a note:

  • Research a question with primary authority

    Research the following question and write a partner-ready memo: Question Presented, Short Answer, Authorities (with pinpoint references), Analysis, Counter-arguments, Open Questions. Cite primary authority only, and flag anything you could not verify:

  • Compare the position across jurisdictions

    Compare how the following issue is treated in England and Wales, Ireland and the EU. Give me a comparative table plus a short narrative, and note where local counsel input would be needed:

Run one on your document

Who it is for, and what it will not do yet.

Best for

  • Litigation associates needing rapid, defensible case research with treatment signals.
  • Regulatory lawyers tracking cross-border obligations and rule diffs.
  • Partners who need an audit log per research turn for SRA defensibility, following Ayinde v Haringey.

Not yet

  • DMS-grounded research over firm precedents is not yet supported: it is planned for a later version, with iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint connectors.
Under the hoodProtocols, gates, skills and sources, for the reader who wants them.

Protocols

  1. 01Planning ProtocolMaps out the plan before any work starts: which sources answer which part of the task, in what order.
  2. 02Jurisdiction GatekeeperConfirms the task sits inside a jurisdiction the firm has enabled, and flags anything that strays outside it.
  3. 03PII RedactionScreens the task for personal and client data and redacts it before dispatch, with an allow-list so the firm's own name is not stripped from its own memo.
  4. 04Source Freshness CheckConfirms every source relied on was fetched during the run and has not gone stale since.
  5. 05Privilege ReviewAssesses the output for privileged or confidential material and flags disclosure risk before it is circulated.
  6. 06Citation VerificationIndependently re-fetches every citation from its canonical source and confirms the quote verbatim by code-level text-match, not by asking the model that produced it.
  7. 07Research Confidence ScoringScores each section low, medium or high confidence, with deterministic floor rules for sections that rely on doubted, overruled or unverified authorities.
  8. 08Citation Style FormatterFormats every citation to OSCOLA, OSCOLA-Ireland, Bluebook or the firm's own house style.

Output gates

  1. 01Citation Match-Set GateConfirms every citation in the draft is accounted for in the set of independently verified authorities before the memo is returned.
  2. 02Quote Verbatim GateConfirms every quoted passage matches the source text exactly, checked by code-level text-match rather than model judgement.
  3. 03Confidence Floor GateCaps the confidence of any section that relies on a doubted, overruled or unverified authority.
  4. 04Provenance Label GateConfirms every authority carries a source link and a treatment label before it reaches the output.
  5. 05Privilege Drop GateDrops any passage flagged as privileged or without-prejudice from the draft before it is returned.
  6. 06Closed-World URL GateConfirms every URL cited comes from the closed catalogue of approved open-web sources, never a paywalled aggregator.

Sub-agents

Citator

For each cited case, runs an independent treatment-research pass on open-web sources and assigns a signal: good law, followed, applied, distinguished, doubted, overruled or unverified, with citing-case evidence.

  1. 01

    Court Analytics

    From open-web judgment data such as Find Case Law, BAILII and judiciary.uk, builds a qualitative profile of a judge or division, honest about the limits of its coverage.

  2. 02

    Local-Document Retrieval

    Searches the firm's local uploaded documents in the active project for prior memos, opinions and matter context, permission-bounded so it never returns content the requesting user cannot see.

  3. 03

    Regulatory Change Tracker

    For a given regulator rule, produces a tracked-change diff against prior versions, correlates it with the regulator's own consultation rationale, and surfaces enforcement context.

  4. 04

    Synthesis & Drafting

    Produces the finished document in the shape the task calls for: memo, comparative table, regulatory brief or litigation playbook, citing every legal proposition and rendering the treatment signal next to every case.

  5. 05

    Regulator Retrieval

    Fetches regulator content such as the FCA Handbook, PRA Rulebook, ICO, HMRC, CMA and Acas, preserving the regulator's own taxonomy and returning rule text verbatim with effective dates.

  6. 06

    Cross-Jurisdictional Comparator

    Normalises a question into the legal vocabulary of each target jurisdiction, produces a comparative table, and flags material divergences with low, medium or high materiality.

  7. 07

    Chronology Builder

    Extracts dated events from pleadings, witness statements and key documents into a single chronology, flagging gaps and conflicts.

  8. 08

    Primary-Law Retrieval

    Fetches case law and statutes from open-web sources such as BAILII, Find Case Law, legislation.gov.uk and EUR-Lex, returning on-point passages with verbatim quotes and pinpoints.

  9. 09

    Fact Verification

    Cross-references factual claims in pleadings and witness statements against the underlying documents and surfaces contradictions with severity ratings.

  10. 10

    Query Planner

    Decomposes a legal research question into three to eight ordered sub-questions, each tagged with jurisdiction and source class.

  11. 11

    Source Identifier

    Maps each plan item to specific open-web sources from the closed catalogue, returning ranked sources with retrieval strategies and search terms.

Skills

  • UK Legal Citation Format
  • Legal Research Methodology
  • Legal Opinion Structure (IRAC-UK)
  • Open-Web Source Catalogue

Connectors in the catalogue

Catalogue tiles, not live integrations today. Documents are uploaded to the matter.

  • Notion
  • Atlassian
  • OpenLaw

See it do real work.

  1. 01Review an NDA against the board minutesA mutual NDA and the board minutes that discussed it go into one matter. The question is not whether the NDA is standard, it is whether it matches what the board decided, and that means reading both documents together.
  2. 02Customer-side redline of a supplier MSAA supplier sends its own paper and asks for signature by Friday. Reviewed from the customer side, the memo names three walk-away clauses and ranks the rest for negotiation.
  3. 03A court-ready research memo on forfeiture and reliefA commercial tenant is in arrears and has broken a repairing covenant. The landlord has peaceably re-entered. The note separates the two grounds for forfeiture and states the effect of re-entering without a court order.
  4. 04Restraint of trade, research answer to client updateA twelve-month non-compete across the UK, Ireland and the EU is checked against the restraint-of-trade doctrine, then rewritten as a letter a lay client can act on.
  5. 05Letter before claim, build the response planA letter of claim under the Pre-Action Protocol for Construction and Engineering Disputes is stress-tested as if acting for the other side, then built into the plan the team runs the pre-action meeting from.
  6. 06A TUPE transfer, from question to work-stream memoNineteen people are in scope of a services transfer. The client wants to know whether TUPE applies and what has to happen and by when. The timetable is the part most likely to go wrong.
  7. 07A personal data breach, the 72-hour assessmentAn export containing HR records for 214 people was sent to the wrong address. The Article 33 clock started at awareness, and the assessment has to be defensible within the 72-hour window, whichever way the decision goes.
  8. 08Drafting a response to the SRA or the FCAAn SRA letter asks eight numbered questions on supervision and AI use, with a firm deadline. The Regulator Response preset answers exactly what is asked, in the order asked, with a chronology and candid acknowledgement where the file has a gap.
  9. 09A paralegal's first weekA paralegal joins the corporate team on Monday and by Friday has run a research question, filled a 378-cell due diligence grid, hit the limit of what a paralegal seat can do, and produced a memo the partner signs off.
  10. 10Review the warranties and limitations in a share purchase agreementA seller's draft share purchase agreement for Halcyon Bidco is read as two documents that have to agree with each other: the warranty schedule and the limitations clause. The memo pairs each warranty with the cap, basket and time limit that actually applies to it.
  11. 11Check the board approval steps for a Delaware mergerAn English parent is acquiring a Delaware subsidiary and the London team needs to understand the approval sequence before instructing US counsel. The memo sets out the statutory steps and marks clearly that the research ran at open-web quality.
  12. 12Review a supply agreement for quality and liability termsUlverston Foods is buying an ingredient under a three-year supply agreement and the recall risk sits entirely on the buyer. The review reads specification, rejection, recall and liability as one chain and shows where it breaks.

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