Malakah Citations

Problem

An answer you can’t check is a research task.

A lawyer is accountable for every piece of advice they give. Saudi law also changes, so “the law says” is only useful if you know which version said it.

The reframe: not “make the answer more accurate”, but “make every claim cheap to check”.

Approach

A citation is only as good as the three layers under it.

A source link only works if the law is stored in pieces small enough to point at, and if retrieval reliably finds the right piece.

• Structure the law. A legislation CMS for the content team: chapters, parts, articles, annexes and amendments.
• Measure retrieval. An evaluation tool for the AI team: did the right articles come back, and in what order?
• Show the source. Legal chat for lawyers: each claim links to its article, which opens beside the answer.

Solution

Four ways to show a source.

I judged every option by one question: how much work is left for the lawyer between reading a claim and trusting it?

• A link on every claim won. It opens the exact article beside the answer, with the cited text highlighted.
• Then, the version. A correct article in an outdated version is still wrong advice.

Solution · Content

Making the law addressable.

You can only link to an article if the system knows where each article starts and ends. So the content team rebuilds each law as a tree before it’s published.

• Source priority. Tell “the law says” apart from “a guideline suggests”.
• A translation check next to Publish. An unchecked translation is the wrong text.

Solution · Quality

Measuring whether the right article comes back.

A wrong article, shown with confidence, is worse than no citation. Teams upload test sets and compare runs by precision, recall, F1 and nDCG.

The citation a lawyer sees is the output of retrieval, so this was the most direct way to improve what they’d trust.

Results

The claim-to-source pattern shipped.

The source opens as a third panel next to the chat and the contract, so a lawyer can check a claim while drafting without switching tools. Malakah serves 1,000+ legal professionals.

Learnings

Trust is a path, not a badge.

Next, I’d test citation density on long answers, measured by time to verify.

• The visible pattern depends on invisible structure. The CMS and the evaluation tool are what made the citation link true.
• Design for the people behind the AI too. The content and AI teams were users of this system as much as the lawyers.