Highlights
What we build:
A contract clause extractor agent using Agentic RAG to parse, classify, and validate legal terms against jurisdiction-specific rule engines
A regulatory research agent that retrieves and cross-references statutes, case law snippets, and regulatory guidance documents from a curated legal corpus
A
ContractAuditStore— append-only, hash-chained SQLite — tracking every clause-level decision with immutable provenanceA
PrivilegeSanitizerthat detects and redacts attorney-client privileged content before it leaves the trust boundaryA React dashboard with clause heatmaps, risk scoring panels, and full audit trail replay
Connection to L85 (Healthcare Agents):
L85 introduced VerticalAgentBase, ComplianceAuditStore, TracingMiddleware, ToolCallSanitizer, and RegulatoryReportRenderer. L86 directly subclasses VerticalAgentBase and ComplianceAuditStore, replacing HIPAA-specific sanitizers with a legal PrivilegeSanitizer and extending RegulatoryReportRenderer to emit ABA-compliant audit reports. The hybrid determinism pattern from L84 (deterministic scorers + LLM rationale only) is carried forward unchanged.
Enables L87 (Team Collaboration & Version Control):
The five named exports from this lesson — LegalAgentBase, ClauseExtractionPipeline, ContractAuditStore, RegulatoryResearchAgent, LegalReportRenderer — are the codebase that L87’s collaborative Git workflow will operate on. Students will fork this repo, open PRs, and conduct code reviews against production legal agent code they authored, making the Git skills immediately concrete.
Architecture Context
Place in the 90-lesson VAIA path:
L86 sits at lesson 86 of 90, in Module 9 (Vertical Case Studies). The curriculum arc has moved from foundations → RAG → agentic reasoning → multi-agent systems → enterprise MLOps → responsible AI → vertical specialization. Legal is the second vertical (after Healthcare) and the most demanding from a determinism-and-auditability standpoint: courts, regulators, and bar associations require reproducible, attributable AI outputs. This lesson encodes those constraints as first-class engineering requirements.
Integration with L85 components:
L85 exports → L86 usage
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
VerticalAgentBase → LegalAgentBase(VerticalAgentBase)
ComplianceAuditStore→ ContractAuditStore(ComplianceAuditStore)
TracingMiddleware → Unchanged, added legal span tags
ToolCallSanitizer → Subclassed as PrivilegeSanitizer
RegulatoryReportRenderer → Extended as LegalReportRenderer
