Statute verification against official sources
SoonEach legal claim we hold about a jurisdiction is checked against that government's own legislation service — and where it cannot be, the answer is "unverified", not silence.
- ✓Nine official legislation sources wired, each behind a licence read before the adapter was written
- ✓Eight jurisdictions where a claim can reach verified — the UK, Ireland, EU instruments, California, Germany (BGB), Commonwealth Australia, Hong Kong and Ontario
- ✓The Netherlands adapter confirms a cited article exists and by design never reaches verified — there is no official English text of the BW to check wording against
- ✓Locating the instrument is not confirming the claim: verified needs the provision text and the claim's substantive terms in it
What it is.
A model can produce a section number that reads perfectly and does not exist. So every legal assertion LexVio holds about a jurisdiction is written as its own claim with its own citation, and each claim is checked against the official legislation service for that jurisdiction before it can reach the product. Nine sources are wired: legislation.gov.uk, the Irish Statute Book, CELLAR for EU instruments, leginfo for California, gesetze-im-internet for the German BGB, the Federal Register of Legislation for Commonwealth Australia, the Department of Justice's own published datasets for Hong Kong, e-Laws for Ontario, and wetten.overheid.nl for the Netherlands.
Eight of those can return a verdict of verified. The Netherlands adapter cannot, and is not meant to: no official English text of the Burgerlijk Wetboek exists to compare wording against, so it confirms a cited article exists and stops there. Everywhere else the verdict is unverified — an honest answer about what could be checked, not a finding that the claim is false. Publication is a separate step and a human one: a named person signs off what the product asserts about a country's law, because a job that published its own output would remove the only link in the chain that is not a model.
Three steps.
End to end.
A jurisdiction's profile is written as atomic claims, each carrying its own citation, so a verdict can land on one assertion rather than on a whole country at once.
A targeted lookup at the official legislation service — never a bulk crawl, and only where the licence permits automated access at all. The provision text has to come back, and the claim's substantive terms have to be in it.
Locating the Act but not the wording caps at unverified. An unreachable source is unverified, never contradicted. A claim a source actually disagrees with is treated as a fabrication and blocks publication until it is removed or corrected.
What you get.
- ✓Nine official legislation sources wired, each behind a licence read before the adapter was written
- ✓Eight jurisdictions where a claim can reach verified — the UK, Ireland, EU instruments, California, Germany (BGB), Commonwealth Australia, Hong Kong and Ontario
- ✓The Netherlands adapter confirms a cited article exists and by design never reaches verified — there is no official English text of the BW to check wording against
- ✓Locating the instrument is not confirming the claim: verified needs the provision text and the claim's substantive terms in it
- ✓An unreachable source returns unverified, never contradicted — an outage cannot manufacture a fabrication
- ✓Coverage is stated per jurisdiction rather than implied: the public catalogue names which ones have a live verifier
- ✓Confidence is the verified proportion of claims — not the model's own confidence, which measures fluency
- ✓Air-gapped deployments register no adapter at all, since an adapter reaches a third-party host, and every claim then reads unverified
Quick answers.
No. It means no source we can lawfully query settled it. Most jurisdictions publish no free machine-readable corpus, and saying so is more useful than downgrading the claim to false or quietly promoting it to true.
Terms of use, not effort. Several legal-information providers forbid programmatic access outright. One of them is recorded in our own codebase as a deliberate refusal rather than a gap — that row moves when a licence does, not when someone writes more code.
A named person. Verification produces the evidence; it does not grant permission. There is no auto-publish, and a claim that a source contradicted must be removed or corrected before anything ships.
More in AI Controls & Guardrails.
Every citation comes back with a verdict — verified, ambiguous or unresolved — and a match on title alone is never verified.
We do not train models on customer content without explicit opt-in. Default is off.
User-pasted text is sanitised before reaching the LLM.
Daily and monthly cost ceilings per organisation. Soft warnings, hard cutoffs.