Review desk: capabilities and limits

A walkthrough (fictional)

Fictional matter — demonstration: Invented names and facts; nothing here is a real client, party, court or filing.

Every name, party, court and matter below is invented for illustration.

1. The fictional firm Harrow & Vale LLP opens the sample matter for its invented client Meridian Data Systems, LLC and attaches the counterparty's draft Mutual NDA from Harbor Analytics, Inc..
2. The desk pins five exemplar NDAs of the same kind and venue, compares the draft against their practice, and returns findings: one-way confidentiality, an indefinite term, an automatic injunction with a bond waiver, no return-or-destroy mechanics.
3. The reviewing attorney approves, rejects or revises each finding with a reason code; nothing is finalized until every finding carries a decision.
4. The Review Certificate derives from the decision trail; it cannot claim a review that did not happen.

Mechanisms

• —The exemplar spine: five pinned exemplars of the same kind, hashed and dated, ground every finding.
• —The Opposing Counsel Pass runs on every review; every objection becomes a finding.
• —The similarity and party guards refuse output that copies or leaks the exemplars.
• —The adjudication rail records each decision append-only, with the reviewer's authenticated identity.

Limits

• —Findings are analysis for professional judgment; the desk decides no law.
• —A document type with no live exemplar lane is refused, not reviewed from imagination.
• —A scanned PDF with no text layer is refused until read through the OCR lane (when the deployment has it on, with per-page confidence and an explicit unreadable state), photographed or pasted as text.
• —A document naming none of the matter's parties, or only a namesake, stops the run until the attorney decides by name whether it belongs; nothing is merged for them.

What this desk refuses

From the refusals catalogue (24 rows apply); the full catalogue is at /refusals.

• Entering the attorney engines without the licensed-attorney attestation, the conflict answers and every acknowledgment.

  Complete the attestation and the conflict screen; a flagged conflict is resolved by the attorney, not the software.

• Running a paid desk without an active session, a trial allotment or a covering purchase.

  Sign in, use the trial allotment, or purchase the matter.

• Finalizing while any finding lacks a decision, or finalizing by anyone who is not an attorney.

  Adjudicate every finding; an attorney records the finalization.

• Representation of any kind: filing, service, negotiation with a party, or appearance, for anyone.

  A licensed attorney represents; the platform prepares.

• Drafting, reviewing or redlining a document for which no lawful exemplar lane is live.

  Choose a document type with a lane, or wait on the named owner item (a keyed connector or a reviewed pack).

• Output that lifts verbatim runs, or too much scattered overlap, from the exemplar filings.

  The run is refused and reported; the engine drafts afresh on the same pinned exemplars.

• Output that carries the exemplar filings' party names into the matter.

  The run is refused and reported; the attorney never sees a foreign party in the draft.

• A dual-engine consensus that swallows a material disagreement between the engines, or names it without binding a disposition to its issue id (a missing, duplicated or unknown id, a bare marker, or a conflict marked decided).

  The divergence is carried as a decision card bound to its issue id; the attorney adjudicates it.

• Delivering single-engine output when a dual run was purchased and one engine failed.

  Retry, or run the standard lane knowingly.

• Grounding a matter on a same-named county of another state.

  The matter's own county tops the ladder; the run searches when the lane is thin.

• Reaching a matter, review, draft, comparison or governed version that belongs to another tenant, or through a removed membership.

  Work inside an active membership of the matter's tenant.

• Reaching a matter the user is screened from, on any surface, including background execution.

  The firm lifts the wall in the record; authorized colleagues keep their work.

• Approving a governed version or adjudicating a finding without a licence record on file when the licence gate is on; administration alone never approves.

  The firm records the attorney's licence; preparation by staff continues unaffected.

• Sending a byte to a vendor outside the permitted list, over a non-https scheme, to a private network, or with a data class the vendor is not cleared for.

  The owner reviews the constant; the surface reports the refusal instead of substituting a vendor.

• Parsing an upload whose bytes do not match its declared type, whose archive expands beyond the fixed limits, or whose "text" is not text.

  The receipt names the failed check; attach a genuine PDF, Word file or plain text.

• Finalizing a version, exporting a final packet or delivering externally without a fresh confirmation bound to this actor, matter, operation, version and recipient, when the confirmation flag is on.

  Mint a confirmation for exactly this act and spend it once.

• A request path carrying a literal or encoded backslash, an invalid escape, double encoding or a control character.

  Request the route as published.

• Running on a document that names none of the matter's parties, or only a namesake, before the attorney decides whether it belongs.

  Decide each flagged source by name (belongs to this matter, or exclude it from the run) and send the run again.

• Attaching text for a scanned page the OCR engine could not read (too few words, or confidence too low to trust).

  Rescan or photograph the page, or paste its text; the readable pages keep their text and their page anchors.

• Reading a scanned PDF through the OCR lane on a deployment that has not turned the lane on.

  Owner item: set FLAG_OCR_LANE=1; meanwhile photograph the pages or paste the text.

• A dual-engine run whose second provider is missing, disallowed, or times out mid-run.

  The typed failure carries the partial stage receipt (which branch ran, which did not, why); the fee was charged once at most; the attorney may separately elect a single-engine tier.

• A requested attestation on the Certificate of AI Use that the audit trail contradicts, or that no recorded event supports.

  Record the event the attestation needs (the attorney review, the check, the filing) and render the certificate again.

• A change to a proposition's kind or disposition (promoting an allegation to a fact, accepting or rejecting a proposition) by anyone but an attorney.

  A licensed attorney records the decision with its rationale; the proposition keeps its kind until then.

• Opening a passage in a format that has no text locator (a spreadsheet, audio or video, an unreadable file).

  Name the sheet and the cell, or the time code, by hand; the registry on /coverage lists every format and its locator.

Inputs

• —A PDF, Word file, plain text, photographed pages, or a scan read by the OCR lane
• —The document type and governing state
• —The purchased matter, carried in the link and the browser context from the last desk

Outputs

• —A findings report with exemplar-grounded reasons
• —The adjudication trail
• —The Review Certificate once every finding is decided
• —Word and PDF exports of the approved version