How do I use it?
Courts and their rules
Create the forum you appear before, choose where its procedural rules come from, and teach it how your court actually applies them.
Why courts come first
Every case names its forum, and the forum decides most of what the room does: which objections can be raised, how the bench is addressed, whether it sits as one judge or a panel, and which procedural rules ground its rulings. Set the court up once; every case in that forum reuses it.
Creating a court
On the Courts page, New court asks two questions, in order.
Which forum is this? A searchable catalogue, grouped by tier — from the pre-court conciliation tier up through the first- and second-level courts to the appellate courts and the court of last resort. The first country modelled is the Philippines: seventeen forums, each carrying the proceedings it actually holds, the thresholds that allocate a case to it, the instruments that govern it, and how its bench is addressed.
Picking a catalogued forum is what lets LexGrit seat the right room: a division of three where the court sits in divisions, one judge where it sits alone, a conciliation panel where the “bench” is not a judge at all. It is also what a curated corpus attaches to.
If your forum is not in the catalogue, the last option — my forum is not in this list — creates it anyway, with a single judge and rules you upload yourself. That escape hatch is deliberate: a court LexGrit has never catalogued must stay usable.
Where do its rules come from? Three answers:
- Your own documents — you upload the rule PDFs. Nothing is assumed and nothing is shared; this forum knows exactly what you give it.
- LexGrit’s rules for this forum — the governing rules, curated and kept current. Offered only where a curated corpus actually exists for the forum; a door onto an empty corpus stays shut, with the reason stated.
- LexGrit’s rules, made yours — starts from the curated edition and pins to it, so you can add your branch’s standing orders and record corrections on top. This is corpus and retrieval tuning, not model training — corrections are stored, ranked, and quoted back with their provenance.
Uploading rule documents
Official documents only — court issuances, statutes from government sources — and each upload records where it came from. The AI cites only what is ingested here, which is the point: a ruling you can check beats a ruling that sounds right.
To correct or update a document, use Replace rather than deleting and re-uploading: the old version stays live until the new one has fully ingested, so the forum is never briefly ruled by nothing.
When a forum is not grounded
A court can be in a state where it cannot retrieve the curated rules it claims — most commonly because no edition of its corpus has been published yet. The court page and the case that names it will say so plainly, because a hearing in that state still runs and looks normal from inside the room. The notice tells you the way out: upload the rules yourself, or wait for the curated edition to be published.
The court builder
Open the court builder on a court to see what its retrieval actually returns and to shape it:
- Preview — ask a question and see the passages the bench would be shown, corrections included. A correction that never surfaces here is one the room will never hear.
- Teach the court — record how your forum applies a provision differently. Corrections outrank the base rules at retrieval but get no free pass on relevance, and they are always labelled as counsel’s own note, never as authority.
- Weighting — nudge how often a provision is cited, in words rather than numbers. A nudge, deliberately: a provision you weight up still has to be relevant before the bench sees it.
- Rebase — when your pinned edition falls behind a newer published one, you are told what moved and offered the move. It never happens silently, because your corrections were written against particular wording.