Descrybe Legal Engine

• Analyze Legal Question — Assess a broad or fact-dependent legal research question before searching to identify the jurisdiction, facts, legal issue, and procedural context needed for useful research. Returns ready_for_research or needs_clarification with up to three short clarifying questions.
• Search Cases by Concept — Use this first when the user wants to find leading or relevant cases about a legal issue, doctrine, fact pattern, jurisdiction, claim, defense, or topic and does not already have a Descrybe case_id. Results are authority-ranked by default to surface stronger legal authorities before ordinary text matches. Use date sorting only when the user asks for recent or newest cases. Each result includes case_id, the Descrybe canonical identifier accepted by known-case tools.
• Search Laws and Rules — Semantic/concept search over U.S. non-case primary law, including statutes, regulations, and constitutional provisions. Useful for legal rules outside judicial opinions when the issue, rule, citation, or topic can be described in natural language. Results are ranked by concept similarity and returned with compact matched source passages.
• Search Case Text — Searches the full text of judicial opinions by exact words or phrases across Descrybe's case-law text index. Useful when specific language matters, such as terms of art, quotes, statutory phrases, or uncommon factual wording. Each result includes case_id, the Descrybe canonical identifier accepted by known-case tools.
• Find Case from Reference — Resolves a citation, case name, case caption, party name, party-name variant, docket number, short cite, quote, or mixed reference into a Descrybe case or candidate set. Use this for party-name or docket-number case lookup when the user does not already have a Descrybe case_id. Resolved cases and candidates include case_id, the Descrybe canonical identifier accepted by known-case tools. The context_text field can improve short, bare, or ambiguous references.
• Extract Case References — Extracts case-law citations and references from legal text provided in the text argument. Returns one item per unique resolved case or best unresolved reference cluster, with occurrence counts, raw citations seen, and tagged excerpts. When resolve=true, results include compact case-identity resolution and a quick treatment indicator for each resolved case, including case_id when a Descrybe case is resolved. This does not verify quotes, analyze support, or return a full citing-case treatment map.
• Get Case Summary — Retrieves the precomputed standard or simplified summary for a known Descrybe case's primary opinion. Requires a Descrybe case_id; for legal research, prefer the standard summary unless the user asks for a simplified or plain-language explanation.
• Get Case Passages — Returns a small ranked list of focused raw passages from a known Descrybe case's primary opinion. Requires a Descrybe case_id and a focus issue, phrase, rule, quote, or fact pattern. This is not a full-opinion fetch and does not return every occurrence.
• Get Case Details — Retrieves case metadata, summary availability, opinion inventory, and treatment summary for a known Descrybe case. Requires a Descrybe case_id.
• Check Case Status — Checks a known Descrybe case for a quick treatment/status signal before relying on it. Requires a Descrybe case_id. Returns whether later cases appear to treat the case positively, negatively, cautiously, or neutrally, plus a rough authority-weight label. This is a fast status check, not a full citing-case map and not a forum-specific binding analysis.
• Find Cases That Cite — Finds later cases that cite a known Descrybe case. Requires a Descrybe case_id. Useful for updating research, finding treatment, or locating newer authority that follows, distinguishes, or discusses the case. Returned citing cases include case_id when a Descrybe case is identified.
• Verify Quote — Verifies whether quoted language appears in a known Descrybe case and locates the matching opinion. Requires a Descrybe case_id and exact or near-exact quote text. Returns whether the quote was found, where it matched, and which opinion contained it.
• Get Case PDF — Creates or reuses a generated Descrybe case PDF asset and returns its public URL. Requires a Descrybe case_id. Returns URL/job metadata or preparation status, not PDF bytes; present the URL to the user instead of trying to download the file.

Schemas and invoke metadata: Directory API