AI & Automation · Meridian Legal
A RAG assistant lawyers actually trust, with cited answers
Meridian's lawyers spent hours digging through thousands of contracts. We built a retrieval system that answers questions with clause-level citations, taking research from hours to seconds.
Client
Meridian Legal
Industry
Legal services
Timeline
10 weeks
Year
2026
0%
accuracy on evaluation set
0K
contracts indexed and searchable
0%
less time spent on research
01 · The challenge
Meridian Legal manages over 40,000 contracts for its clients. Finding precedent language, unusual clauses, or conflicting terms meant associates manually searching PDFs, sometimes for a full day per request.
Accuracy requirements were brutal. A wrong answer in legal work is worse than no answer, so a generic AI chat tool was never an option. Every answer needed a source the lawyer could click and verify.
02 · The solution
We built a clause-level RAG pipeline. Instead of splitting documents into arbitrary chunks, contracts are parsed into their legal structure: parties, definitions, obligations, termination clauses. Retrieval happens at the clause level, and every answer links to the exact clause in the original document.
A reranking model orders results by legal relevance, not just similarity, and an evaluation set of 300 real research questions keeps quality measurable. Accuracy on that set went from 71% with naive chunking to 94% with the final pipeline.
03 · How we did it
The approach
Parse the legal structure
Custom parsing broke 40,000 contracts into typed clauses, preserving cross-references and definitions instead of arbitrary chunks.
Build retrieval for law
Hybrid search combining embeddings and keyword matching, with a reranker tuned on lawyer-labeled relevance judgments.
Cite everything
Every answer includes clause-level citations that open the source document at the exact paragraph, so verification takes one click.
Measure with real questions
A 300-question evaluation set built with the partners, scored on every release, so accuracy is a number and never a feeling.
Research that took an associate a full day now takes seconds, and every answer shows me exactly which clause it came from. That citation is why we trust it.
Sarah Mitchell
COO, Meridian Legal
The stack
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