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.