Putting a Question to Research Lab

Most tools that answer questions expect you to arrive with half a question and refine it. Research Lab is built the other way round. One legal issue goes in, one research operation runs, and one finished report comes out. There is no reply box under the answer, no thread, and no way to say "now narrow that to Punjab" without starting again.

That is a deliberate shape rather than a missing feature, and it changes how the question should be written. This is a note on writing it well.

What it is searching

Research Lab reads two collections and nothing else: the written summaries of judgments in the case law database, and the pages of the statutes in the library. It does not search the open web, and it does not fall back on what the model happens to remember about Pakistani law. Every proposition in the answer is tied to a numbered authority drawn from those two collections, and where they hold nothing on the point, the answer says so rather than filling the gap.

That is the constraint worth holding in mind while typing. A question the collections cannot reach will come back honestly empty, and an honestly empty answer is still an answer you have spent something on.

Say where you are

Statutes are scoped by jurisdiction. If the question names a province, the search narrows to that province plus federal law, which is what you want, because a Punjab rent question answered out of the Islamabad Ordinance is worse than no answer at all. If the question names nowhere, the jurisdiction is not guessed, and the search stays wider than it needs to be.

Case law is treated differently and is never filtered by province. A Sindh High Court judgment on a federal statute is good authority in Peshawar, and narrowing the judgments to the province you happen to be sitting in would throw away most of what is useful.

So: name the province when the law is provincial, and do not bother when the question is about the Contract Act 1872 or the Code of Civil Procedure 1908.

Name the provision if you have one

There is a lane that does nothing but look up a section, an article or a reported citation named in the question, and it is the most exact of the several searches that run. Typing "section 489-F" or "Article 199" or a reported citation puts that lane to work directly, instead of asking the other lanes to guess their way to the same provision through the words around it.

Write the reference the way you would say it. "Section 73 of the Contract Act" works as well as the shorthand.

Write the whole issue, once

Because there is no follow-up, the question has to hold the qualifications you would otherwise have added in a second message. A useful question tends to carry three things: the provision or the area, the fact that makes it a question rather than a lookup, and the jurisdiction if it matters. "Can a landlord recover possession where the tenancy period has expired but there is no default in rent, in Punjab" is a question the search can act on. "Rent law" is not.

It is also worth resisting the urge to ask two things at once. One issue, one operation is not only how the tool is built; it is how the answer reads best, because an answer covering two issues divides its authorities between them and gives each half the evidence.

What it will turn away

Not every question is a research question, and the ones that are not are sorted out before any search runs. A request to draft something is pointed at the drafting tool rather than answered, because Research Lab finds law and does not produce instruments. A question about the service itself is pointed at the FAQ. A personal question, or something that is not a question at all, is declined in the same way.

The important part is what a declined question costs, which is nothing. No inquiry is deducted, and the refusal says so on its face. The same is true of a question that fails for our reasons rather than yours. You are only charged for an answer you actually receive.

After you press ask

The work runs on the server rather than in the browser, and it takes the better part of a minute. You can close the tab, lose signal, or walk away, and the report will be waiting. It writes itself into your Desk the moment it exists, so there is nothing to save and no button to remember.

One last thing that catches people who are used to counting drafting quota: research inquiries are counted on their own. Asking a question never spends a drafting instrument, and the two are reported separately for that reason.