What are the non-negotiable design rules for legal AI?

Most software is allowed to degrade gracefully. A search engine that returns a slightly worse result is still useful. Legal AI does not have that luxury: an output that sounds right and cannot be defended will be filed, cited and relied on, and the cost falls on a client who never saw the machine. This program asks what the non-negotiable design rules are for systems whose outputs end up in front of judges, and it answers with architecture rather than aspiration.

The Four Laws of System Design for Computational Law state the rules in order of precedence. The Zeroth Law forbids presenting outputs with unwarranted confidence. The First requires that every result trace back to its inputs, reasoning and authorities. The Second requires that every legal proposition rest on validated authority rather than on whatever a model absorbed in training. The Third makes reasoning components independently testable and version-controlled. The program's other work applies those laws to concrete builds: why retrieval over chunked documents is not legal reasoning; why a benchmark must ask whether a system surfaced the proposition that does the legal work, at the right stage and with confirmed status, rather than whether it avoided a fake citation; how a small company of narrow agents behaved once certain decisions sat behind red lines reserved for humans, and why an off-switch needs as much design as a start button; and what happened when a blind eDiscovery review ran with no humans in the loop and its failed gates were published alongside its results.

Why this matters: reliability cannot be inspected into a legal AI system after the fact. A verification layer bolted onto a generator catches some errors, misses the structural ones, and can teach the generator to cite less rather than reason better. Guarantees belong in code, not in prompts, and a system must be able to halt without producing a confident answer. The Institute publishes its design rules so that any vendor, its own sponsor included, can be held to them.