Legal AI is having its GPT-3 moment. The technology is good enough to be useful, every founder is shipping, and the gap between the marketing demos and the production systems is starting to matter. This piece walks through the architecture of a source-backed legal intelligence system — what it actually takes to ship one that practitioners will trust.
The key constraint we imposed on the CourtGPT system: every claim the model produces must resolve back to a primary source the practitioner can verify in one click. That single constraint drives most of the architectural decisions below.
The four-layer architecture
A source-backed legal intelligence system has four distinct layers, each solving a different problem:
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