A legal research assistant for Gulf law that shows its sources
Lawyers in the region work across four legal systems in two languages, mostly from scanned PDFs on government portals. Sylos reads the official texts, answers questions about them, and points back to the article each answer came from.
Inspect the evidence
Read the measurement status and open questions alongside the engineering account below. Internal product metrics are not independently verified results.
The problem
A commercial dispute in Dubai can turn on a UAE federal law, a Saudi royal decree and a Qatari amiri decree in the same afternoon. Each one sits on a different government portal, structured differently, often as a scanned PDF with no usable text layer underneath.
General-purpose assistants will answer a question about Gulf law readily enough. What they cannot do is tell you which article the answer came from. An answer a lawyer cannot cite is an answer they cannot put in a filing, so it saves nobody any time.
What we built
Sylos is a search and question-answering layer over the primary legislation of the Gulf states. A lawyer can filter by country and instrument, run full-text search, or put a question in plain language and read the answer with its citation attached. The same treatment works on the firm’s own material: contracts, rulings and internal memos can be uploaded and questioned the same way.
What made it difficult
- Legal Arabic is not general ArabicTerms carry meanings fixed by statute, and a near-synonym can change the legal effect of a sentence. A general-purpose model handles this badly, so we fine-tuned AraBERT on the legal corpus itself rather than trusting a model trained on the open web.
- Source fidelity beats fluencyIn legal work a confident wrong answer costs more than no answer at all. Retrieval is constrained to the indexed corpus and every response is bound to the passage it was drawn from, which is what makes the output checkable rather than merely plausible.
- Four legal systems, one interfaceEach jurisdiction numbers, structures and amends its instruments its own way. The index preserves that structure instead of flattening everything into undifferentiated text, because the structure is often what the lawyer is actually navigating.
Technology
Selected for this system, not from a house standard.
Check it yourself
Sylos is live and open to the public. Run a search against Gulf legislation, ask it something you already know the answer to, and see whether the citation holds up. That is a better test of our work than anything we could write here.
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