CASE 03 · METHOD TEARDOWN
An answer with a page number beats a fluent one.
The contract, the clause numbers and both answers below are fabricated for this page. This is a teardown of a method, not a client story — no accuracy rate or result figure is claimed anywhere on it.
Ask a general-purpose model about your own contract and you get an answer shaped like every contract it has ever read. It is fluent, it is plausible, and it is about somebody else's agreement. The difference is not the model — it is whether the answer is required to point at a page.
The fluent answer
Nothing here is stupid. That is exactly the problem: it reads like counsel and it was written without opening the file.
Question: our maintenance contract with the supplier — how long do we have to notify them before we terminate, and does the notice period change after the first renewal?
Answer: Standard maintenance contracts of this type normally require three months' written notice before the end of the term, sent by registered letter. After the first automatic renewal the contract usually continues on a yearly basis with the same three-month notice, and in most cases either party may also terminate for material breach with thirty days to cure. You should be safe if you send the letter at least ninety days before the anniversary date.
— fluent, confident, and built from what contracts like this usually say. It never opened your contract. "Normally", "usually", "in most cases" are the only honest words in it.
The grounded answer
Same question, same model. The rule changed: every statement must carry a document, an article and a page — or say it is not there.
Question: same question.
Answer: Two months' written notice before the anniversary date, by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt. — Maintenance agreement, art. 9.2, page 7.
After the first renewal: the notice period is unchanged, but the term becomes 12 months instead of 24. — Amendment no. 1, art. 3, page 2, signed 14.03.2025.
Conflict flagged: the original art. 9.2 says "three months"; amendment no. 1 replaces it with two. The amendment is later and explicitly supersedes art. 9.2 — but both are shown so the decision stays yours.
Not found in the documents: any thirty-day cure period for material breach. It is not in the agreement or in the amendment. If you need one, it has to be negotiated, not assumed.
Ambiguous: "anniversary date" is not defined anywhere in the file. Signature date and service start date differ by eleven days.
The sample stays in English on every language version — it is the exhibit; the analysis around it is what gets translated.
The four rules doing the work
Together they cost some fluency. That is the trade, and it is deliberate.
rule 01 — Every sentence carries its source or does not ship
Document, article, page. A sentence that cannot name where it came from is deleted before you see it, however true it sounds. This is what makes the answer checkable in twenty seconds instead of trusted on faith.
rule 02 — "Not in your documents" is a valid — and required — answer
The cure period does not exist in this file. The fluent answer invented one because contracts like this usually have one. Being able to say "it is not there" is the single most valuable behaviour in the whole method, and it is the one a general-purpose chat is worst at.
rule 03 — Contradictions are surfaced, never resolved silently
The original says three months, the amendment says two. A system that quietly picks one is making a legal decision on your behalf. Both are shown with their dates, the later one is identified as the later one, and the choice stays with the person who has to live with it.
rule 04 — The document set is a boundary, not a suggestion
Answers are drawn from the files you provided and from nothing else — no web search, no background knowledge topping up the gaps. That is the whole point of running it on your own machine, and it is why the boundary of the answer equals the boundary of your archive.
What changed between the two answers
- Each statement gained a document, an article and a page number.
- The invented thirty-day cure period disappeared and became an explicit "not found".
- A real conflict between the contract and its amendment surfaced instead of being smoothed over.
- An undefined term — "anniversary date" — was flagged rather than quietly interpreted.
- The hedging words disappeared: no "normally", no "usually", no "you should be safe".
- The answer became verifiable in under a minute by opening two pages.
What this actually improves
Not the volume of answers. The gain is that a wrong answer becomes visible: with a citation you can check it, and with an honest "not in your documents" you know to go and ask a human. A fluent guess offers neither, and it is exactly as confident either way.
How it runs in practice
Your documents are indexed on your own machine, the question retrieves the passages that actually mention it, and the model is only allowed to answer from those passages, with the citation attached. Nothing is uploaded to a third party, and the archive never leaves the room it is in.
What this page does not claim
- No client agreed to this, because the contract does not exist. Nothing here is a testimonial.
- No accuracy percentage is claimed — nothing was measured on a real archive.
- This is not legal advice and it does not replace your lawyer or accountant. It finds passages; it does not interpret them for you.
- Retrieval can miss a passage. The citation lets you catch that; it does not promise it will not happen.
Try it against a document you already know the answer in
That is the honest test: take a file whose contents you know, ask the awkward question, and check whether the citation lands on the right page — or whether the system admits the answer is not there.
Ask about a document set of my own
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