Trial: capabilities and limits

The order of proof

• Ten workspaces on one registry

  Ten workspaces read one registry: order of proof; witnesses, with side, examiner and a subpoena flag read off the service record; Rule 26(a)(3) disclosures behind a second confirming click; exhibits and the offer-and-admit console; demonstratives; admissibility; motions in limine; instructions; voir dire; objections and rulings.

• The notebook assembles, and the gaps stay showing

  One read joins will-call and may-call witnesses, in examination order, to the exhibits they sponsor, designations, objections, instructions and motions in limine. An exhibit binds by tracked link; a free-text name is a labelled fallback. Missing sponsors and unsupported elements project as named gaps.

Witnesses and their exams

• Suggestions that carry their source

  Five deterministic sources, each with a provenance line: deponents, witness-shaped case-map relations, declaration signers, retained experts, and exhibit sponsoring-witness fields. No model runs there. The join key keeps a generation suffix, because a father and son are two witnesses, folds a credential, and remembers dismissals.

• An exam outline that is a projection, not a generation

  Six kinds of existing row assemble it: recorded exam topics, exhibits this witness sponsors, prior sworn answers, an expert's qualification and basis, unsupported elements, and the motions in limine it must respect. Two fields name what the record could not supply and which read failed.

• Testimony a model may nominate and only the transcript may place

  A model nominates testimony, returning verbatim quotes with no page or line. A deterministic locator places each in the transcript; an unplaceable quote is counted and dropped, never guessed. The parser refuses an unreadable reporter export, a backwards page number, or broken line numbering.

• The same witness, across the firm's own matters

  One read joins a person's rows across the firm's own matters: what we asked that custodian two years ago, and whose witness she was. It runs read-only, scoped by the owning firm behind an ethical wall that fails closed. Namesakes over-merge, and it says so.

Exhibits and getting them in

• Exhibits proposed from the record, behind two floors

  Candidates come from hot-coded documents carrying their coding reason, documents the evidence ledger cites and how often, and transcripts already carrying designations. Two floors stand in front: a privileged or work-product document is never proposed, and the authority screen keeps reported decisions off the list.

• One status machine, four doors into it

  Proposed, marked, offered, objected, admitted, excluded, withdrawn. Desk, phone, deposition and trial floors walk one transition law, one check against the exact row read, and one audit write, the door recorded. Reconsideration is the one reversible edge. An FRE 107 aid is used, not admitted.

• One exhibit, several uses, and a record that asks for the fact

  A document can come in for one proposition and not another, so a use carries its purpose from a federal vocabulary, the proposition in the attorney's words, the hearsay basis and any limiting instruction. A stipulated use cites its stipulation, an opposed one its ground.

• A foundation checklist from the rules of evidence

  Six entries cover authentication, self-authentication, the business-records and public-records exceptions, summaries of voluminous originals, and proof of contents. A model may only map a known provenance id to an ordinal: it cannot rewrite an element, decide admissibility, or bind a name-matched sponsor to a witness.

• Exhibit numbers as an address

  Courts run separate sequences per party, so the allocator counts each party's own run, and a hole is reported as a hole. A renumbering arrives as a plan whose old-to-new map is the audit row. An Ex. 12 resolves back, naming what it cannot match.

Before trial

• Where the record disagrees with itself, and a scaffold that stops where the law begins

  Motions in limine come from a contradiction the case map holds, a hot document coded in the shape of FRE 403, 404, 407, 408, 411, and each live opposing exhibit. The charge conference gets burden, element and damages rows. Both leave placeholders where authority goes.

• A demonstrative that says what it is made of

  A generated aid carries a receipt per element back to the document version and page, or the transcript page and line, plus its own byte digest and a field separating quoted record from model text. A page range outside the exhibit is refused, not trimmed.

What you carry into the room

• A binder that never becomes a document, and never quietly loses an exhibit

  The notebook streams to the attorney as work product, never written to a document row, so it reaches no client portal and enters no retrieval. Nothing is authored. An exhibit whose bytes will not open still takes a page in sequence, naming what is missing.

• Second Chair, in the room

  Shipped

  A live deposition lens on glasses, where a one-glance budget is enforced, an unconfirmed citation prints as needing confirmation, and silence is a recorded decision. Live deposition has its own page.

• Second Chair on a second platform

  Shipped

  The same lens on an open hardware stack, in beta, authenticated on a per-session token rather than on ambient credentials.

Limits

• The trial surfaces are scaffolding for an attorney, not a finished practice module, and they are not in the public capability catalogue.
• No instruction text, motion ground or admissibility conclusion is authored here. Where the legal standard goes a placeholder goes, and the attorney supplies the authority.
• Foundation, hearsay basis and stipulation are what somebody recorded, not what a court has held. A checked item is an attorney's assertion until a ruling is entered against it.
• The suggesters read the rows this matter already holds. A witness nobody deposed and a document nobody ingested cannot be proposed, and their absence from a list is not a statement that they do not exist.
• Live deposition capture depends on hardware the firm supplies, and the second platform is in beta.

What BRON refuses

• Emit a designation with only one end of the range.

  An accepted designation is court-facing, and the passages come from the significant testimony extracted at ingest, which carries no page or line at all. The range is therefore parsed out of the transcript itself. When either edge cannot be established the passage comes back as a refusal with its reason instead of a suggestion, and an end coordinate is never fabricated.

• Decide whose witness this is.

  Only a retained expert's row records a side, so every other candidate is returned as unknown and the accept path has no default. Direction decides the shape of the outline: an adverse witness handed a direct plan gets friendly, open, non-leading questions that read perfectly well right up until they are used on someone who came to hurt the case. The outline is a projection for the same reason. A model can invent a fact, and an outline that invents one document, one date or one prior answer is worse than no outline, because the attorney reads it in the room. The firm's own written assessment of an expert is left out of the cross-matter index for the same reason: the index carries the posture and points at the matter.

• Offer a published opinion as a trial exhibit.

  A reported decision is evidence about the law rather than a fact in the matter: it is argued in a brief, not admitted into evidence. The floor was written after a live matter proposed two published opinions and the firm's own draft trial brief as exhibits. Every upstream signal had worked correctly and the documents really were hot-coded; the suggester simply had no notion of what kind of document it was reading.

• Renumber an exhibit that has been marked.

  Its number is already on a sticker, in the court reporter's log and about to be in a transcript, so moving it rewrites the record of a trial. Only a proposed exhibit may move, the floor lives in the pure layer where no caller can route around it, and a frozen ordinal stays occupied so the movable exhibits flow around it rather than colliding with it. The binder export never renumbers either: the sticker prints the registry's number verbatim, reads whose exhibit it is from the matter's own recorded role, and the same exhibits produce the same bytes. Its first page says it is trial strategy prepared in anticipation of trial, so a copy left on counsel table is not mistaken for a producible list.

• Let a ruled motion return to an unruled state.

  A ruling may be corrected to another ruling, and a ruled challenge to an expert may be retired as withdrawn, but neither may return to a state that reads as though no motion was ruled. An application path must not make a court act disappear.

• Read an empty objection log as no objection.

  The log is typed by hand at counsel table, so an empty one says nothing about any exhibit rather than saying nothing was objected to. Three answers exist where two would do: the log is silent or could not be read, the log is in use on this matter and names this exhibit nowhere, or entries name it. An objection with no ruling and one taken under advisement are both counted as unruled, and a ground with no transcript cite is counted apart rather than presented as anchored in the record.

• Write instruction law or a motion ground.

  Both scaffolds emit explicit placeholders for the attorney to confirm, and the screens flag the rows that carry one. The scaffold never invents instruction text and never asserts a legal conclusion. Drafting from either happens in the document pipeline where the citation gate applies, never on these surfaces; a target the attorney declined is remembered server-side; and the firm's own licensed pattern set imports beside the proposed rows as rows that say where they came from.

• Stay quiet when an exhibit is offered without foundation.

  The court-mode tripwire fires when the examiner moves to admit an exhibit still recorded as proposed or marked, and goes silent once it has been offered or admitted. It is a checklist prompt about our own exhibit, never a claim about the witness. The checklist behind it becomes an obligation only when a confirmed trial date enters the seven-day runway, and a trial record that could not be read mints no date at all.

Trial is in three weeks. What do I actually have, and what is still a fight?

Arrange the order of proof, witness examinations, exhibits and recipient-specific binders from the matter's existing record. Ten connected workspaces show what you have and what still needs attention. Trial remains under development, with attorney-supplied authority required for legal scaffolds.

Inputs

• Discovery and the evidence ledger
• Depositions, designations and the transcript
• The witness registry and the expert roster
• The matter brain and its contradictions
• The case model's claims and elements

Outputs

• The pretrial disclosures
• The exhibit list and the binder
• The charge conference
• The objection log and the trial record
• The case map