How it works
Counsel speaks. The record builds itself underneath.
Three layers: capture that never waits, a structured record of the matter, and an agent that works against that record rather than the recording. You never see the structure — you see one screen.
The three layers
Capture is fast because the thinking happens somewhere else
Capture
Audio streams in chunks and never waits for the hearing to end. A second pass labels who is speaking, tuned for SA citation formats, Latin and court nomenclature: English, isiZulu, Afrikaans and seSotho, including counsel switching mid-sentence.
The record
Issues, facts, authorities, documents, events and obligations, with issues as the spine. A matter is a set of contested issues, each carrying a state: pleaded, argued, conceded, decided or abandoned.
The agent
The agent runs against the record and never against the raw audio, which is what keeps the live panel quick while it thinks. Retrieval over case law, contradiction checks, drafting. It proposes; it never commits.
Why contradictions come free
A fact knows who asserted it, and when
A fact knows who asserted it, who disputes it, and the page it sits on.
The same fact, asserted one way in the papers and another way from the bar, is a query over the record. So a contradiction is not a clever trick — the shape of the record is what surfaces it, rather than a guess.
The difference between the file before court and the file after it is the hearing note, and nobody types it.
Delivery was effected on 2 August 2020
Asserted — founding affidavit ¶ 44, p 17
Relied on — from the bar, today 10:39
Contradicted — from the bar, today 10:41
Contradicted — by the client, today 11:23
Three modes, one pipeline
Chosen once at the start, and the screen reshapes
Hearing
Court is sitting. Timeline down the middle, matter context in a rail, one thing at a time. Quiet mode is alerts only: three targets, no scrolling text, on a ground dark enough not to be conspicuous in a courtroom.
The file →Moot
Argue aloud against the other side’s actual pleaded case, at any hour. Then take the debrief, out of character.
Moot mode →Client meeting
Quiet by default, because you are talking to a person. After a client meeting, an explicit list of what the client said today against what is on the papers.
Client meetings →The only way anything is written
Accept, edit or dismiss
Every inference arrives as a card to accept, edit or dismiss, and that card is the only way anything reaches the file. It carries what it proposes, how confident it is, and where it came from — the utterance, the moment, the paragraph.
What was proposed, what you did with it and when is in the audit trail, which is a professional protection before it is a feature. Dismissed proposals never touch the record, and an edit keeps both what was proposed and what you made of it.
It is the trust mechanism and the primary input method at once. There are no forms anywhere else.
Delivery of the invoices was effected on 2 August 2020.
Attaches to — issue 1 · prescription
From — van Wyk SC, 10:39:12 · founding affidavit ¶ 44, p 17
See it against a matter you already know
Half an hour, your own papers, and one hearing you have already had. If it does not find something you missed, we have not earned the next conversation.