Legal · citable retrieval
NexusLaw
Legal answers are only useful if you can cite them. NexusLaw is retrieval over primary law built around that fact — every passage it returns can name the exact statute, rule, or case section it came from — with an attorney intake pipeline alongside it.
01 / Origin
The challenge
Make legal research answerable and quotable. A general-purpose chatbot that summarizes law without a citation is worse than useless in practice — it cannot be relied on or checked. The goal was retrieval where every result is anchored to its source, over a corpus that is local and always available rather than dependent on slow external services at query time.
02 / Artifacts
What exists because of it
- 01
Ingestion of Illinois primary law — statutes, court rules, and caselaw — plus practitioner reference material, into a searchable knowledge base.
- 02
Section-anchored chunking: passages are split along sections, chapters, and numbered headings, carrying the metadata that makes a result quotable rather than sliced across two provisions.
- 03
A drop-in ingestion path — add a new reference PDF and it is indexed automatically.
- 04
An attorney intake pipeline in a CRM for the matter/relationship side of legal work.
03 / System
How it moves
Sources are ingested once and embedded into a vector database, so lookups do not gamble on a slow or rate-limited external API at query time. The load-bearing choice is section-aware chunking: legal text is addressed by citation, so chunks are anchored to sections and carry book/chapter/section metadata — that metadata is what makes a retrieved passage citable. Retrieval is exposed as a tool the assistant queries, rather than hitting the database directly, and a separate CRM handles attorney intake.
- Input Primary law statutes, rules, caselaw
- Step Section-aware chunking carries citation metadata
- Step Vector search Qdrant + local embeddings
- Output Cited answer names its section
04 / Decisions
The tools and their jobs
- Qdrant vector database
- Ollama local embeddings (mxbai-embed-large)
- Section-aware ingestion citable chunking + metadata
- MCP tool retrieval interface
- Twenty attorney intake pipeline (CRM)
05 / Today
An honest current state.
Ingestion and citable retrieval work across the Illinois primary-law sources and reference material, and new material can be added by dropping it in. The design principle — never trade section-anchored citability for convenience — has held. It is engineered as a working system rather than a documented product; the retrieval quality is the point, and it is real.