Ethical-Wall-Aware Precedent Answers

At a law firm or in an in-house legal team, lawyers ask the same drafting questions again and again, and the answer usually sits in the firm's own clause bank or precedent sets. A general assistant can answer fluently but without sources, and a retrieval tool that ignores ethical walls can surface work from a matter the asker must not see. This Botlit concept shows a know-how agent that answers from the firm's approved precedents, cites every clause it uses, and withholds anything behind a wall while saying that it has done so.

The illustration shows the chat view of a sample Precedent Assistant, with a practice selector set to corporate practice and badges showing the agent is active and retrieval is enabled. A lawyer asks whether the firm has a limitation-of-liability carve-out for data incidents in a software reseller agreement. The reply says two approved precedents cover the point and summarizes how they treat data-breach losses, followed by two numbered citations: a clause-bank entry with its version and year, and a reseller agreement precedent with its practice area and year. Beneath it, an amber notice states that one passage was withheld under an ethical wall and that the knowledge manager was notified, without naming any matter. A follow-up asking for the exact wording returns the quoted clause with its citation.

A Retrieval for this turn panel counts passages used, passages withheld and bases searched, and lists two retrieved passages with similarity scores and badges for the clause bank and the corporate precedents, with the withheld passage shown only as withheld under an ethical wall. An Access checks card lists two checks, each marked checked, and a Knowledge bases card lists both bases as ready, noting that two clause-bank entries are awaiting review.

Those checks carry the cross-product part of the design. Before retrieving, the agent is designed to check the asker against ProServiceWorld's matter-level access restrictions and, through SemanticFed's governed agent interface, against the row policy SemanticFed is designed to enforce on precedent metadata. Clause-bank entries are designed to keep their source matter from ProServiceWorld's document classification, and entries without one are designed to wait for knowledge-manager review before they become searchable, which the awaiting-review note on the clause bank illustrates. Every answer is designed to be logged with the passages it used. The concept is aimed at practicing lawyers, knowledge managers and the risk and conflicts teams who maintain ethical walls.