Verdex is a model-agnostic legal reasoning engine that turns raw case materials — testimony, exhibits, statutes, precedent — into a structured, citation-backed, adversarially-tested draft analysis. It does not decide cases. It gives judges, advocates, and clerks a rigorously traced starting point, then requires a qualified human to review, critique, and sign off before anything leaves the system.
The engine is built around one idea: legal reasoning is jurisdiction- shaped, not jurisdiction-agnostic. The same pipeline runs for a common-law appeal, a civil-law statutory claim, or a mixed/Sharia-influenced family matter — only the weighting of statute versus precedent, and the procedural assumptions underneath it, change. One engine, reparameterized per deployment.
All outputs produced by Verdex are draft analyses only. They are not legal advice, legal opinions, or judicial verdicts. Every output must be reviewed, critically evaluated, and signed off by a qualified human practitioner before any use. Verdex does not replace human judicial judgement.
This is not a policy on top of the code — it is the code.
packages/guardrail blocks verdict and directive
language at the output layer, and packages/signoff
makes every downstream use of a case's analysis conditional on a recorded
human sign-off. Neither can be configured away at deployment or user level.
INGEST IRAC REASONING TREE HYBRID RETRIEVAL ADVERSARIAL SYNTHESIS HUMAN-SIGNED
transcribe & discard → Issue · Rule · Application → graph + vector → first party vs second party → DRAFT OPINION
· Conclusion party agents, evidence- non-binding,
weighed always reviewed
- Ingest, then discard. Audio, video, and scanned documents are transcribed or OCR'd, hashed for provenance, and the binary is deleted. Only extracted text — and the cryptographic proof of what it came from — is ever persisted.
- Assemble an IRAC tree. Facts, issues, governing statutes, and precedent are structured into a validated Issue → Rule → Application → Conclusion graph, where every conclusion must trace to at least one fact and one rule.
- Retrieve, hybrid. A fused graph-traversal-plus-vector-recall layer pulls the governing law and controlling precedent for each issue, built on demand rather than pre-computed wholesale.
- Argue both sides, then weigh. Independent agents construct the strongest good-faith argument for each party, evidence is scored for reliability, and a synthesis agent resolves each issue — surfacing weak links and unsettled law rather than hiding them.
- Sign off, or it doesn't ship. The draft analysis, its full reasoning trace, and every citation it rests on are reviewable in the case workspace. Nothing is usable downstream without an accountable human decision recorded against it.
| Property | Guarantee |
|---|---|
| Model-agnostic | Every model call routes through packages/provider's LLMProvider interface; no phase, agent, or package hardcodes a vendor. |
| Jurisdiction-aware | Reasoning weight (statute vs. precedent, procedural assumptions) is parameterized per legal family — common law, civil law, mixed, Sharia-influenced — via packages/reasoningprofile. |
| Transcribe-and-discard | Binary case materials are hashed, then deleted; only extracted text and chain-of-custody metadata persist (packages/provenance). |
| Non-binding by design | Verdict/directive language is blocked in code, not just in prompts (packages/guardrail). |
| Cross-case isolation | Retrieval is case-scoped by construction; one case's facts cannot leak into another's reasoning (packages/knowledgeisolation). |
| Full provenance | Every claim traces to a source node; every source node carries a verifiable citation (packages/citation). |
| Sovereign deployment | A fully offline, zero-egress tier exists for the most sensitive courts (packages/airgapped). |
| Auditable end to end | Every sensitive action — data access, reasoning step, sign-off — writes to an immutable, hash-chained audit trail (packages/auditlog). |
Verdex is a ~90-package monorepo built in eight parts. The table below is
the scannable summary; docs/architecture/overview.md
is the authoritative map, naming every package and linking to its own
design doc.
| Part | Capability |
|---|---|
| 1 — Foundation | Multi-tenant config, observability, persistence, RBAC, and the provider-abstraction layer every later call routes through. |
| 2 — Ingest | Transcribe-and-discard pipeline: speech-to-text, OCR, multilingual normalization (Arabic, Urdu, Tamil, English), PII handling, evidence classification. |
| 3 — IRAC schema | The Issue/Rule/Fact/Application/Conclusion node model, plus statute, precedent, and legal-ontology representations that populate it. |
| 4 — Knowledge layer | Graph + vector storage, tree assembly and integrity validation, hybrid retrieval, and citation-fidelity guarantees. |
| 5 — Reasoning & synthesis | Issue-framing, first- and second-party argument agents, evidence weighing, law application, and the synthesis agent that produces the draft opinion — always behind the non-binding guardrail. |
| 6 — Case workspace | Case lifecycle state machine, the judicial-facing web workspace (tree visualization, evidence review, opinion review), mandatory human sign-off, search, annotations, versioning, and reporting. |
| 7 — Security & compliance | Encryption, key management, immutable audit trail, data residency, air-gapped deployment, access governance, privacy controls, and compliance-framework mapping. |
| 8 — Platform hardening | External-system integration, bulk migration, corpus updating, localization, performance, scalability, reliability, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD hardening. |
See docs/README.md for the full package-by-package index.
| Layer | Stack |
|---|---|
| Backend services & packages | Go 1.25, npm-workspace-free Go workspace (go.work) across ~90 packages |
| Frontend | Next.js 14, React 18, TypeScript 6, Tailwind CSS 4 |
| Data | PostgreSQL + pgvector, graph store |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions — lint, build, test, SCA/SAST scanning, documentation link checking, branch-and-commit policy enforcement |
| Deployment | Terraform-based IaC across cloud, on-premises, and fully air-gapped tiers |
verdex/
├── apps/web/ # Judicial-facing case workspace (Next.js)
├── services/ # Backend microservices (Go)
├── packages/ # ~90 shared libraries — provider abstraction, IRAC
│ # engine, reasoning agents, security, ops
├── infra/ # Infrastructure as code (Terraform)
├── docs/ # Architecture, deployment, admin, and user docs
└── temp/ # Scratch space — not shipped in production builds
New to the codebase? Start with
docs/architecture/overview.md, then:
| If you are... | Start with |
|---|---|
| Deploying a new tenant | docs/admin/setup-guide.md, then the matching docs/deployment/ guide |
| A judge or advocate using the platform | docs/user-guide/judges-advocates.md |
| Operating the platform day to day | docs/operations/runbooks.md |
| Integrating against Verdex's APIs | docs/api/reference.md |
| Reviewing security/compliance posture | docs/security-compliance/overview.md |
Common local commands (see Makefile for the full list):
make lint # golangci-lint across every Go module
make build # build every Go module
make test # test every Go module
make ts-lint # ESLint + typecheck for apps/web
make ts-build # next build for apps/webdocs/README.md is the full documentation index — every
operator, admin, developer, and practitioner document in this repository,
including each package's own authoritative doc/*.md. Every relative link
in that tree is validated on every pull request by
packages/docsite's link checker, so it never goes
silently stale.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for full conventions. In short:
- One branch per unit of work —
phase-NNN-short-slugfor planned phases,fix-short-slugfor small corrective work. - Atomic commits, imperative mood, no squash merges — full history is required for audit.
- No phase may hardcode a model provider; no binary ingestion artifact may be persisted past extraction; every reasoning output must carry the non-binding label. These three rules are enforced in code and covered by tests, not left to review discipline alone.
Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.