Juris is used by lawyers to do work that decides other people’s lives, liberty and livelihoods. A mistake we make does not end at our product. It ends in a filing, in front of a court, with a client’s case attached to it.
This page is not marketing. It is the standard we build to, written down, and it is the standard you should hold us to.
The rule above all others: we do not let silence become reassurance
Every serious failure this product can have takes one shape — absence of evidence presented as evidence of absence.
- ·A source we could not reach is not proof a case does not exist.
- ·A collection that does not contain a judgment is not proof no such authority exists. No case-law collection is complete, and some decisions are never written down at all.
- ·A search that returned nothing is not a clean bill of health.
- ·A citation we could not check is not a citation we checked.
Wherever Juris does not know, it must say so, in those words. It may never round its own uncertainty up into confidence. We would rather show you a warning you did not need than withhold one you did.
We do not invent authority
- ·Juris cannot cite what a live search did not return. Not as a policy — as a mechanism. No citation, quotation or reference is ever produced from a model’s memory.
- ·Every citation is independently re-checked against the official register before you see it, whether or not the assistant asked for that check. The safeguard does not trust the model.
- ·Three states, never two. A citation is confirmed (with its link), not found (say so plainly — it may be fabricated, do not cite it), or unchecked because the source was unreachable (say that too). We never collapse “unchecked” into “fine”. That collapse is how a fabricated case reaches a court.
- ·A search engine returning a case is not evidence that this case exists. We mark a citation confirmed only when the record we got back is genuinely the one we asked about.
- ·Quotations are checked against the source text — and where we cannot check one, we say so. A fabricated quotation attributed to a real judge is the most damaging thing we could produce and the least likely to be caught: a bad citation gets checked when you click the link, an invented sentence in quotation marks usually does not. So wherever the full judgment is available to us, every quotation is held against what the court actually wrote. Where it is not available — and for some courts, including Alberta’s, no lawful full-text source exists — Juris tells you the quotation was not checked, rather than letting you assume it was. The Knowledge page sets out exactly which courts these are.
- ·We never claim more certainty than we have. That an Act exists and that a section is in force and applies to your facts are different questions, and only you can answer the second. We do not assert good-law status.
The lawyer decides. Always.
- ·Juris drafts. A qualified lawyer verifies and takes professional responsibility. We do not design or sell it as a substitute for your judgement.
- ·We do not give legal advice to the public, do not predict case outcomes, and do not advise anyone whether to pursue litigation.
- ·We do not profile, predict or imitate judges. Anywhere. Juris refuses to research a named judge as a person, to tell you how one tends to rule, or to argue in their voice. This is refused in our code, before the request reaches the AI at all — not by asking the model to behave, because a determined user talks a model into most things. In France judicial profiling is a criminal offence carrying up to five years, and the Find Case Law licence forbids it in the United Kingdom. But we refuse it in Alberta too, where it is perfectly lawful. A court works only for as long as the argument decides the case rather than the person hearing it, and we will not build a product that erodes that and then geo-fence the harm. Reading, quoting and distinguishing what a judge has written is a different thing entirely, and Juris does it gladly.
- ·Every source is shown and can be rejected. A result with no resolvable source link is not shown at all.
- ·We tell you, in the product, that output is AI-generated and must be verified — and that the collections are incomplete, so that finding nothing is never mistaken for there being nothing.
We handle other people’s confidences
- ·A law firm’s case file is the most sensitive material we will ever hold. It is encrypted at rest per firm and isolated per tenant. Your data is never used to train AI, never sold, and yours to export or delete.
- ·Privileged material is treated as privileged. Documents you flag as privileged are excluded from AI context.
- ·Our free public citation checker stores nothing. Text pasted into it is never persisted or logged. That is enforced in the code, not promised in a policy — because you may paste part of a live matter into it.
- ·We do not extract, compile or profile individuals from judgments. We use records to find legal authority, not to build information about people, and we respect anonymisation and reporting restrictions in full.
We respect the sources we depend on
- ·We use official records under their licences, and we ask when we are unsure rather than assume. Where a use may require permission, we apply for it rather than argue we do not need it.
- ·We send you back to the source. Every authority links to the official record. We do not republish judgment text and we do not index it.
- ·We query the registers live rather than working from a stored copy, so a record a court has revised or withdrawn is not served to you from a stale cache.
We tell the truth about what we have built
- ·We do not market a capability we do not have. If the product does not do it, we do not say it does — not on a landing page, not in an email, not to a regulator.
- ·We do not claim certifications we do not hold. “Built to” and “aligned with” — never “certified” — until a real attestation exists.
- ·We disclose our limitations before someone else finds them. A discrepancy discovered by a customer or a regulator does far more damage than one we volunteered.
What we got wrong
In July 2026 we audited ourselves against this code and found we were breaking it, in three ways. None of them was reported to us. We went looking.
We told Alberta lawyers that real Alberta cases might not exist.
This is the one that matters most, because it is a breach of the first rule on this page. The Canadian database we checked citations against turned out not to carry the Alberta courts at all. We had never asked it what it held. So when a lawyer pasted a genuine Court of Appeal judgment, Juris reported no match and warned it might be fabricated. We are an Alberta company, and those are the courts our clients are in. We had built this entire product on the rule that silence from a source is never evidence of absence, and then shipped exactly that mistake in our own province. It is fixed: every Canadian court, in every province, is now confirmed against the register lawyers actually cite. And where we still cannot check something — quotations from an Alberta judgment, for instance — we now say so out loud instead of implying we checked.
Our product could be talked into imitating a named judge.
We never built judge analytics. We did not have to. One feature asked the assistant to act as a bench, and the assistant could search the web — so a user could simply ask it to research a named judge and argue in their voice. No feature audit would have found this, because there was no feature to find. It is now refused in our code, before any request reaches the AI, in every country we serve. Our marketing had also described reading the presiding judge and estimating how a case would fare before them. That was removed from every public page the day we found it.
We put another organisation’s name behind an answer it never gave.
Our results were labelled as confirmed against a well-known legal database that we were in fact never calling. The check was real; the name on it was not ours to borrow. A citation is now labelled only with the source that actually performed the check.
We also found several ways in which a citation we could not verify might still have reached a lawyer looking sound. All are fixed, and automated checks now attempt to smuggle a fabricated citation and a fabricated quotation past our safeguards on every release, and fail the release if they succeed.
We are telling you this because a code of ethics that admits nothing is decoration. If we get something wrong again, you will hear it from us.
When we get it wrong
- ·We look for our own failures before a user does, and we assume our safeguards are broken until we have proven otherwise against live data.
- ·A fix is not done when the code changes. It is done when we have verified it is actually running.
- ·We say what happened — to you, and to a regulator if they are owed it. Plainly, without minimising, and with what we are doing about it.
Concerns, or something we have got wrong: hello@kwatateam.com. This code is reviewed at least annually, and immediately after any incident in which Juris presented an unverifiable authority to a lawyer as though it were sound.