How evidence is verified: everything enters low and has to earn its place
There is no way into this system at the top. A fact arrives as raw material, and it moves up only by acquiring the specific thing each level requires. Nothing is promoted for being repeated, prominent or persuasive.
The four Trust Locks
Every claim in a case carries one of four marks, and the mark travels with the claim everywhere it goes — on screen, in the audit trail, in the export.
The floor. A working or supplied claim the software has recorded but not confirmed against anything. Most material lives here for most of its life, labeled on its face so you always know what you are standing on.Where everything enters
An inference, not independently corroborated. Something has been derived here — a reading, a connection, a conclusion — and it is marked as derived rather than dressed as fact.Inferred, not corroborated
A known result with a relational explanation behind it: tied to the document, exhibit or measurement in this case that accounts for it. There is a source you can open.Traced to something in this case
Independently corroborated. Supported through more than one provenance root, with no outweighing contradiction. Copies of one origin do not count as second roots.Independent corroboration, not repetition
Arithmetic over these claims cannot promote its own status. When two values combine, the result takes the dominant position of its inputs and ties resolve downward, never upward — mixing something explained with something unverified never produces something validated.
Why repetition does not promote anything
Support is accumulated per provenance root, with diminishing returns as copies pile up under the same root. Three hundred documents descending from a single press release collapse to one root and produce almost no support. Three genuinely separate origins outrank all three hundred. Contradicting sources are not averaged away either — uncontradicted opposition gates promotion outright.
Pressure is attention, not truth
Pressure cannot promote or demote a claim's Trust Lock.
The relational engine measures how much structural pressure a document carries — how connected it is, how often its patterns recur, how central it sits in the case. That number tells you where to look. It is deliberately wired so that it cannot raise a claim's verification status. The loudest thing in a file is frequently the thing everyone repeated, and a system that promotes on volume is a system that launders rumours into findings.
The top level is not reachable by rule
The rules can carry a claim as far as corroborated. The final step — this authority controls, this fact is established for this matter — is left open on purpose for the verification layer and for you. A deterministic engine can prove that two independent roots agree; it cannot decide that a case is good law today. Nothing in the software will award itself that.
The handoff from PAi Claims is read-only
PAi Claims accumulates by design — scope, pricing and carrier-conduct patterns carry forward, and it gets sharper the more claims it sees. PAi Legal handles the same material under stricter rules, and the seam between them is guarded in both directions.
PAi Legal never rewrites the Claims record. The Claims case graph stays the base record in your own workspace. Legal builds an overlay beside it and writes its own separate extension graph, and the handoff is refused outright if the Claims files do not match: the graph must be marked handoff-ready, the claim and the graph must be the same persisted revision, and the file hash must match what the graph says it should be. Legal hashes the base graph before and after linking and stops if it changed.
Every node arrives carrying its own Trust Lock and its whole promotion history — brackets are not flattened on the way across, so nothing is silently upgraded by the move either. A node that was contradicted in Claims comes across at its last uncontradicted level, marked contradicted. Claims material enters ranked below the controlling court documents in this matter, and any new legal proposition the Parliament creates on top of it starts unverified and is recorded as the Parliament's own, with the source Claims nodes left untouched.
One matter, one place
Each matter in PAi Legal lives in its own folder, drive or jump drive, with its own index, its own authorities and its own analysis. There is no shared store between cases, so there is no path by which one client's material could raise the status of anything in another client's file.