Legal

In a legal matter, the world model is the current state of the case: what is established, what is still contested, what each side has proven, and what the record no longer supports. In Apex v. Orbit a ruling last week struck one of Apex's allegations, a deposition moved what counts as contested, and a filing deadline shifted when the court reset the schedule. An agent answering from its context window answers from a snapshot and cites the fact the ruling already overturned. A belief state that lives outside the model carries the matter as it stands now, so the lawyer's agent reads where the record actually is before it drafts a word.

The world

The environment is a matter. The entities are the parties, the claims and counterclaims, the filings on the docket, the deadlines on the calendar, the evidence in the record, and the rulings that decide what any of it means. The relations are the connective tissue of the dispute: one piece of evidence supports a claim, a deposition contradicts an allegation, a ruling supersedes an earlier assumption, a motion depends_on a fact still in discovery.

The state of this world changes under you. A ruling that grants summary judgment moves a claim from contested to decided. A document produced in discovery flips a "we believe" into a "the record shows," or knocks one down. Ground truth lives in the record and the court's orders. Everything else (the internal memo, the associate's read, the opposing counsel's framing) is a claim of lower rank waiting on the record to confirm or kill it.

What streams in

The agent's observations are the events that move a case:

• filings and the docket entries that track them
• discovery documents and the productions they arrive in
• deposition transcripts and witness statements
• correspondence with opposing counsel
• opposing motions and the exhibits attached to them
• court rulings and orders

Each one revises the case state. A produced document can establish a fact that was contested; a ruling can supersede a position the team had been building on. The agent's own work folds back in too: a memo it drafts, a deadline it logs, a citation it pulls becomes the next observation, so the model accrues a faithful record of where the matter actually stands.

The belief state

The case state is a set of claims. Each one carries a status (established, contested, or unknown), a confidence, and a provenance the agent can name. A later ruling supersedes an earlier belief rather than quietly coexisting with it, and a fact that has gone stale loses certainty on its own.

1┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
2│  MATTER: APEX v. ORBIT                                       │
3│                                                              │
4│  ● Apex owns the disputed patent     ESTABLISHED  92% │ rule │
5│  ● Orbit shipped before priority date  CONTESTED  54% │ depo │
6│  ● Damages exceed the statutory cap     UNKNOWN   ?   │ gap  │
7│  ✗ "License lapsed in 2021"  SUPERSEDED by 6/14 ruling       │
8│                                                              │
9│  Gap: "Is the Orbit prototype admissible?"                   │
10│  ⚠ Stale: "Witness available" depo is 9 months old           │
11└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Read the status as where the claim stands and the percentage as how sure the agent is, each tied to a source it can cite. Ownership of the patent is established at 92% because a ruling decided it. The priority-date claim sits at 54% and contested because a deposition cuts against the filing. The crossed-out license line is the point: an earlier belief the team relied on, now superseded by the June 14 ruling, so the agent will not cite it again. The stale flag works the other way. A witness-availability fact from nine months ago has decayed enough that the agent should re-confirm it before it builds a deadline around it.

When a second associate's agent works the same matter, their pictures fuse into one. "The prototype is admissible" and "the court excluded the prototype" cannot sit side by side as equals; the contradiction surfaces for a lawyer to resolve before either one reaches a brief. You declare your world (environment, intent, policy, actions); the engine compiles observations into the belief state and projects the worldview your agent acts from.

What we're after

The intent is to support the lawyer's current position. Success has a precise shape: the case state is accurate and current, every deadline is tracked, and every assertion the agent makes traces to admissible evidence. The limiting factor is the discovery gap. What strengthens the position most is rarely more argument; it is closing the open question whose resolution would move a contested claim to established or expose a weakness before opposing counsel does.

Moves are ranked against that intent, not against raw uncertainty. The agent does not chase the most uncertain fact on the board. It chases the gap whose resolution most strengthens the position it has to defend.

The policy

A matter runs under rules that outrank any single draft the agent might want to produce:

When two sources disagree, the hierarchy decides. A signed order outranks the associate's optimistic read of it, every time.

The actions

What the agent may do in this world, grouped by what it costs to be wrong:

Today, policy and actions are a modeling lens you encode, not a contract the engine runs for you. You express the invariants, the source hierarchy, and the safety classes in how your agent observes and acts; the engine does not yet take a registered policy and enforce it, and a declarative config surface for this is on the roadmap. So read these tables as the contract your agent honors. What the engine supplies is the picture each decision rests on and a record of what every action changed, so a partner can audit the chain before anything is signed.

Plan & act

1import Beliefs from 'beliefs'
2
3const beliefs = new Beliefs({
4  apiKey: process.env.BELIEFS_KEY,
5  agent: 'legal-agent',
6  namespace: 'matter:apex-v-orbit',
7  writeScope: 'space',
8})
9
10// 1. Orient: read the current case state; the ranked next moves ride back on it
11const context = await beliefs.before('What is the current state of the Apex matter?')
12const [move] = context.moves   // top-ranked, already in hand; no extra call
13// → { action: 'gather_evidence', subType: 'pull-latest-ruling', valueOfInformation: 0.8, ... }
14
15// 2. Act: your agent dispatches the tool the move points to
16const ruling = await runTool(move.subType)   // 'pull-latest-ruling' → your docket fetch
17
18// 3. Fold the result back in; it becomes the next observation
19await beliefs.after(ruling.text, { source: 'Order on MSJ, 6/14' })

The verdict the world model renders is the state of the case as the record stands today, and that is what a recall layer cannot do. A RAG store over the matter file would hand the agent the original complaint, the superseded license memo, and the June 14 order with equal footing. It would let the agent draft a motion citing a fact the court already threw out. thinkⁿ marks the license belief superseded, so the agent will not reach for it; it ranks pull-latest-ruling above draft, because confirming the current record strengthens the position more than another paragraph built on a stale assumption. Once the ruling folds in, the agent drafts from what is established, cites only what is admissible, and the partner can walk every assertion back to the line that supports it. The lawyer stays on the loop for anything filed or served.