What is the Legal Engine?
The agentic AI reasoning system that powers Lawis's intelligent legal analysis.
The Legal Engine is the AI core that powers everything intelligent in Lawis. It's what runs when you send a message in AI Chat, what retrieves and ranks results in the Search Engine, and what performs risk analysis on your contracts.
An agentic AI, not a chatbot
Unlike a simple chatbot that generates a single response, the Legal Engine is an agentic AI — it plans, executes multiple steps, uses tools, and reasons over what it finds before giving you an answer.
When you ask a legal question, the Legal Engine:
- Breaks your question into research tasks
- Searches the legal database using multiple retrieval strategies
- Reads and reasons over the retrieved legal texts
- Synthesizes a grounded answer with citations
Seeing the engine in action
In the AI Chat interface, every response includes an Execution steps panel that shows you exactly what the Legal Engine did to answer your question — which tools it used, what it searched for, and what it found. This transparency is intentional: you can inspect the AI's reasoning at any point.
Click the execution steps panel in any message to expand the timeline of tool calls and reasoning steps the engine took.
Built for legal, not general use
The Legal Engine is purpose-built for legal research in Arabic and French-law jurisdictions across the GCC and North Africa. Its retrieval system includes:
- Semantic vector search — finds conceptually similar legal provisions, even if they use different terminology
- Knowledge graph traversal — understands legal relationships between laws, amendments, and cross-references
- Re-ranking — scores results by relevance using a legal-domain re-ranker before presenting them
The Legal Engine uses a hybrid retrieval architecture powered by Azure AI Search, combining dense vector embeddings with keyword search and semantic re-ranking to provide accurate, citation-backed legal analysis.