# RAG Systems for Legal & Compliance

> RAG systems for legal and compliance teams: query contracts, policies, and regulation with cited, source-grounded answers instead of manual review. Built by Sentient Arc.

Cited answers from your contracts, policies, and regulation, every response traceable to the clause it came from.

## The challenge in Legal & Compliance
Legal and compliance work is retrieval under penalty: finding the controlling clause across a contract estate, checking a position against current regulation, surfacing the precedent that governs a matter. A general model is fluent and confidently wrong about your obligations, and an uncited answer is unusable when the question is whether a clause exists. The corpus is large, the language is precise, and the cost of a missed provision is real.

## Example workflows

### Contract clause retrieval
- Ingest the contract estate, preserving clause structure, defined terms, and schedules
- Chunk and embed by clause so indemnity, termination, and liability terms stay retrievable
- Retrieve the governing clauses for a counsel question across every agreement
- Answer only from retrieved text, citing the contract, clause, and version

### Regulatory and policy lookup
- Index regulation, internal policy, and prior guidance into one queryable corpus
- Resolve a compliance question to the controlling rule and its effective date
- Return the answer with the source passage and a self-check that the citation holds

## Outcomes
- Counsel finds the governing clause across the estate in seconds, not in a manual review
- Every answer is traceable to a source passage, so positions are defensible
- Regulatory questions resolve against current text with the effective date attached
- New contracts and policy updates enter the corpus without reworking retrieval

## FAQ
**Can a RAG system be trusted for legal review?**

It is built to be auditable, not autonomous: answers are constrained to retrieved text and cited to the exact clause and version, so counsel verifies the source rather than trusting a black box.

**How does it handle defined terms and cross-references in contracts?**

We chunk by clause and preserve defined terms, schedules, and cross-references during ingestion, so retrieval returns the governing language with its context intact.

**Does it keep up with changing regulation?**

New regulation and policy versions are added to the corpus with effective dates, and answers cite the controlling text, so a question resolves against current obligations, not stale ones.

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Canonical page: https://www.sentientarc.com/solutions/rag-systems-for-legal