Stage 1 · in
It starts with sound
A live hearing: a class moot, a booked recording, a court stream. The audio enters, and transcription begins on-device: on a booked private Mac mini the sound never leaves the room.
Stage 2 · the stable prefix
The transcript locks, and never walks backward
Words arrive fast and ghosted in gray. The instant a prefix is stable it locks to full ink, and a locked word is never rewritten under your eyes. The stream may only grow, never retract.
Stage 3 · the trigger
Most of the hearing is quiet. One moment isn't.
Plain detectors watch the stream scroll past, and stay silent. When the crux lands (a judge's pointed question, an objection, a hostile hypothetical), the trigger gate fires once.
The economics, honestly: we don't run the AI on every second of audio. That's how the incumbents keep a flat price. One analysis fires per detected moment, not per second.
Stage 4 · retrieval
The moment fans out across real law
The query goes two ways at once (meaning and words), then the two rankings fuse. Candidate opinions surface from a corpus of real, published cases. No language model has spoken yet.
Stage 5 · verify or vanish
The citation gate: cite a real case, or don't exist
Every candidate must resolve against the verified index and every quote must match word-for-word. What passes glides through. What can't be verified is discarded. Never shown, never softened into a maybe.
Stage 6 · the deliverable
The card lands: real case, real pinpoint, why now
A skeleton card paints almost instantly because it carries no model output, just a verified case, its citation, and the why-now. The speakable argument line then streams into that same card without moving it.
Why now: reasonableness is judged from the on-scene perspective. The judge's "resistance" framing invites exactly this holding. Lead with the fact-bound test.
Stage 7 · out
And you keep thinking
The chain ends where the learning lives: your notebook. Verbatim capture hurts learning, so your words stay primary in full ink; the coach's work sits behind them as a muted substrate you fold in or ignore. Two inks, never blurred.
Lead with Graham's fact-bound test. Hammer: prone + cuffed + one ambiguous reflex ≠ resistance. Have the 40-second reply ready.
Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386: objective reasonableness from the on-scene perspective; three factors (severity, threat, resistance). Risk: opponent may distinguish on duration.
How fast, honestly
Nobody in this category hits sub-second, and we don't pretend to. Here is the honest clock for the chain above. The first useful thing lands fast, the fully-verified argument lands in seconds.