Drafting and citations: capabilities and limits

Drafting from the record

• Two libraries, one door each, and neither hides what it could not read

  One research console searches case law and legislation across the wired sources, keeps the run as a named session with its pins and stance, and orders by treatment. The firm's own saved language sits behind one finder over seven tabs. An unreadable source is named.

• A long-form engine that names what it left out

  Shipped

  A motion is planned as a skeleton, budgeted per section, expanded in parallel against the cached evidence ledger. The document being answered reaches every section, and anything dropped is named a degradation: one complaint here runs 229,228 characters, and an allegation not denied is admitted.

• The proposition ledger, in front of the drafter

  The fact record reaches the drafting prompt as a deterministic block, each proposition with its posture, unknown, disputed, admitted, objected or undisputed, and each assertion cited to its document and page. Bounds are 24,000 characters, 30 propositions and six assertions, with every overflow stated inside.

• The numbers an outbound draft may not carry

  Every drafted document is external: the valuation block hands the drafter the conditional p10 to p90 range and the single legitimate target, withholding the firm's floor, ceiling and walkaway. The damages schedule reads the matter's line items, not the demand package holding the posture.

Every sentence keeps its source

• Click a sentence, land on the exact bytes

  A quotation resolves to a character range inside one immutable version, under a named normalization profile: mark stripped, CRLF folded, NFC, no trimming, offsets in UTF-16 units. Exact needs a matching digest, an in-bounds range and an unsplit surrogate; anything less opens the source undrawn.

• On a scanned exhibit, the box on the page

  For an image-only PDF the locator is a box on the page, with the engine, page read state and per-word confidence, for up to 60 pages. A word crossing a page break is reported as spanning, pages named. HTML names two surfaces, with no default.

• Navigation is never promoted to verification

  Opening a source is not evidence that it says what the brief says, so the occurrence receipt keeps them apart. Its treatment field carries four states, three of them kinds of not knowing. The coverage registry states which formats carry no text locator at all.

Revising without regenerating

• The file is edited, never regenerated

  A Word document saves back as tracked changes anchored into the real file, so formatting survives and every edit is a redline, across an eleven-row capability matrix over six stages. Inserting a banked clause re-serializes nothing else, and a cite-audit finding arrives the same way.

• Checks tuned to under-report, and a repair loop with a hard ceiling

  Each deterministic pass is tuned to suppress rather than cry wolf: a factual sentence is flagged only on a strong record marker with no citation beside it. Blocking findings feed one revision directive, capped at three iterations and six candidates, with no override path.

Before it can leave

• One composer, thirty-four chokepoints, and a send gate that throws

  Shipped

  Signing, client sharing, minting a PDF, e-filing, exporting, approving and sending email each run one fixed sequence of thirty-four chokepoints, appended and never renumbered. A citation is verified, unverified or not checked, a marker says the lookup could not run, and an unresolved one raises.

• A statute gate that fails closed

  Shipped

  A statute is grounded in this matter's own authorities, or checked against a closed list of authoritative hosts, or it is unverified.

• Quote fidelity against the source text

  Shipped

  A quotation is checked against what the source actually says, not against the fact that the source exists.

• A treatment scan whose strongest verdict is no negative signals found

  Shipped

  Without licensed citator data that is the honest ceiling, and every note says so.

Filing and certification

• A pre-file check against the judge's standing orders

  Shipped

  The forum's loose formatting prose resolves into numbers, with the assigned judge's standing orders overlaid from an attorney-verified row only. A check that could not run reports not checked, never a pass, and a pass resting on an unconfirmed rule says so and names it.

• A certificate that refuses

  Shipped

  The Certificate of AI Use is rendered from the audit trail and will not certify what the record contradicts. Refusing is the feature.

• A word-count certificate computed from the body

  Shipped

  Over the limit it states that the document does not comply, rather than certifying that it does.

Limits

• Citation checking in chat is advisory. The hard block is at the send gate, because chat is not a filing.
• Source Lens is navigation, not verification. It says which bytes a sentence points at; whether the authority supports the proposition is the citation gate's separate question.
• Some formats carry no text locator. An image exhibit opens, and the registry says so plainly rather than offering a locator that would quietly relocate itself.
• Pagination from extracted text approximates the court-filed document and is surfaced as advisory.
• The adverse-authority sweep warns and does not block, because directly adverse and controlling are judgments for counsel.

What BRON refuses

• Let a brief leave with ten pages nobody looked at.

  If one extraction window fails while others succeed, the citation count is non-zero and nothing looks wrong. That case blocks by name, because otherwise a filing could reach a court carrying a record asserting those pages were checked.

• Let a model corroborate its own citation.

  Only authority text may ground a statute cite. Research notes were excluded after an audit found the verification was circular, and a rule number appearing in a client PDF is not the rule.

• Hand the drafter a pinned authority as though it had been cleared.

  Drafting from a research session carries the pinned ids and nothing else: no approval, no override, no verification flag, no authority text. A pin records that someone found an authority interesting, not that a citation quoting it holds up, so the send gate reads the seeded draft exactly as it reads one typed from scratch.

• Cache a not-found.

  Only positive statute results are cached. A transient search failure must never brand a real statute fabricated.

• Honour an override it could not record.

  The override writes an append-only audit row before the send proceeds, and a failed audit write aborts the override. A lost trail is how a filing once went out with nothing durable behind it.

• Offer an override at all for three of the checks.

  Tracked changes, client visibility and reviewer sign-off have no override parameter anywhere in the codebase. Their block carries a path to fix it instead, so a refusal never dead-ends.

• Invent a page number for the table of authorities.

  With no page substrate it gives deterministic order of first appearance and labels it as such, which is a true fact about the assembled text.

• Put one lawyer's name over another lawyer's bar number.

  When a specific attorney signs, the block takes that attorney's own verified bar record and never back-fills from the firm-wide default. A missing number renders as a visible confirmation token the attorney must resolve, because borrowing a colleague's is a bar-discipline event rather than a formatting nicety.

• Block a filing for walking past an adverse authority.

  Whether a case is directly adverse to the position actually taken, and whether it controls in the deciding court, are legal judgments this software does not make. It names the adverse authorities the matter already holds that the draft never mentions and leaves the call with counsel. A gate built on a filename prefix would be routed around within a week and would take the honest checks down with it.

• Clean the firm's own copy.

  Only the copy crossing the trust boundary is scrubbed, across twelve categories of authorship, edit-session fingerprints, editing time and internal comments. The stored version keeps its metadata, which is the firm's own evidence of who edited what and when. Hidden text is reported and never removed, because deleting it would change the document the attorney believes they reviewed.

• Stamp a court's acceptance with the moment someone clicked.

  Confirming that a court recorded a filing takes the court's own timestamp, a docket reference and a typed reason, from a licensed attorney in the matter's firm. A receipt timed to the click would be a record of our interface rather than of the docket.

Can I see what every sentence rests on before I put my name on it?

Build a motion section by section from the matter's evidence. Inspect the source behind a sentence, review its authorities and check the exact document version before it is signed, filed, shared or sent.

Inputs

• The matter brain
• Discovery and the evidence ledger
• Researched authorities
• Firm templates and house drafting style
• The forum and the assigned judge's orders

Outputs

• The filing and the served copy
• The audit trail
• The exported provenance manifest
• The client portal, once an attorney releases it