Tag

#documents

June 16, 20265 min read

A second legal system: what breaks when a legal pipeline changes country

In short: taking a legal pipeline built for Canadian law to a second legal system is less about code that crashes than about assumptions: that a document is in English unless told otherwise, that a…

May 5, 20264 min read

Citations that point at the wrong paragraph

In short: a citation can be wrong in at least seven different ways, and only two of them involve the model. Most come from how long documents were cut into chunks. Name each failure, and give each one…

April 21, 20265 min read

When BM25 beat the embeddings

In short: on legal text, a keyword ranking function from the 1990s wins a whole class of queries that dense embeddings lose: citations, section numbers, defined terms. I run both and fuse the…

March 24, 20265 min read

Laws have versions, and most RAG pretends they don't

In short: a section of a statute is not one text, it's a series of texts, each in force for a stretch of time. If your retrieval only knows the current one, it will answer a question about 2021 with…

March 10, 20265 min read

Ingesting a country's law when every province has its own format

In short: Canada's legislation lives on a different website for nearly every province and territory, as PDFs, Word files, an XML API and plain web pages. When a product depends on that text, the…

December 16, 20255 min read

Rules vs transformers for extracting metadata from legal documents

In short: on the same Spanish-language legal documents, the transformer path was more accurate and slower. The rules were fast, cheap and easy to explain. I kept both: rules by default, the…