Router Practice Area Detector

Practice Area Detector

Purpose

Practice area detection determines which body of law is relevant to the request. This drives:

1. Skill selection: the practice area narrows the candidate skills from hundreds to a manageable shortlist
2. Knowledge routing: RAG retrieval is filtered to the relevant corpus (corporate law library vs. employment law vs. real estate)
3. Persona selection: certain practice areas map more naturally to certain personas (investor requests → investor persona; employment → hr persona if the user is an HR professional)
4. Jurisdictional calibration: some practice areas have heavily jurisdiction-specific rules (shariah-finance → KSA, UAE, DIFC; arbitration → seat-specific rules)

Practice Area Labels

Return exactly one primary practice area label and zero or more secondary labels from this set:

Signal Heuristics

High-Confidence Corporate Signals

"NDA", "SHA", "shareholder agreement", "board resolution", "AGM", "EGM", "option pool", "ESOP", "cap table", "convertible note", "SAFE", "venture capital", "term sheet", "liquidation preference", "anti-dilution", "drag-along", "ROFR", "co-sale", "company formation", "articles of association", "memorandum of association", "SPV"

High-Confidence Employment Signals

"employment contract", "termination", "severance", "end-of-service gratuity", "EOSG", "non-compete", "non-solicitation", "handbook", "disciplinary", "TUPE", "redundancy", "unfair dismissal", "sponsored employee", "work permit"

High-Confidence Real Estate Signals

"lease", "tenant", "landlord", "eviction", "rent", "service charge", "premises", "property purchase", "sale and purchase agreement" (real estate context), "land registry", "strata title", "RERA", "DLD", "Abu Dhabi municipality"

Disambiguation note: if FIDIC is mentioned alongside "construction" rather than a lease context → construction not real-estate

High-Confidence Data Privacy Signals

"GDPR", "PDPL", "privacy policy", "data subject", "DPIA", "data protection officer", "DPO", "breach notification", "right of erasure", "right of access", "consent management", "cookies", "personal data", "data processing agreement", "DPA" (in data protection context)

High-Confidence Arbitration Signals

"arbitration clause", "notice of arbitration", "DIAC", "ICC arbitration", "LCIA", "DIFC-LCIA", "SCCA", "arbitral tribunal", "arbitral award", "seat of arbitration", "enforcement of award", "New York Convention", "UNCITRAL rules"

High-Confidence Shariah Finance Signals

"murabaha", "ijara", "sukuk", "wakala", "musharaka", "mudaraba", "takaful", "AAOIFI", "Shariah supervisory board", "riba-free", "Islamic finance", "sharia-compliant"

High-Confidence M&A Signals

"share purchase agreement", "SPA", "asset purchase", "merger agreement", "due diligence", "representations and warranties", "indemnification" (in M&A context), "MAC clause", "material adverse change", "earn-out", "escrow", "closing conditions", "acquisition"

High-Confidence Litigation Signals

"demand letter", "statement of claim", "complaint", "summons", "injunction", "interlocutory", "discovery", "deposition", "judgment", "appeal", "enforcement", "ex parte order"

Disambiguation Rules

Some signals overlap between practice areas:

• "Indemnification" alone → corporate or M&A or services depending on context; check document type
• "NDA" → corporate (most common) but may be employment (post-employment NDA) — check context
• "DPA" → data-privacy (data processing agreement) vs M&A (due diligence) → check surrounding signals
• "Employment" + "equity" → corporate + employment dual-label
• "Lease" alone → real-estate; but "software license" → ip; "equipment lease" → banking or commercial
• "Arbitration clause" within a contract review → arbitration secondary; primary is the contract's practice area

Confidence and Fallback

• ≥ 0.80 confidence: proceed with the classified practice area; no clarification needed
• 0.50–0.79 confidence: classify but note the uncertainty in downstream skill selection (may pull from two practice areas)
• < 0.50 confidence: return admin as the practice area and trigger [[conversation-clarifying-questions]] to ask: "What kind of legal matter is this related to? For example, is it about an employment issue, a contract, a business transaction, or something else?"

Do not ask open-ended questions — offer 3–4 practice area options inferred from the available signals.

Output

{
  "practice_area": "<label>",
  "confidence": 0.0-1.0,
  "secondary": ["<label>", ...],
  "disambiguation_note": "<if applicable — e.g., 'DPA could be data-privacy or M&A; assuming data-privacy from context'>"
}

Related Skills

• [[router-intent-detection]]
• [[router-jurisdiction-detector]]
• [[router-complexity-grader]]
• [[router-persona-selector]]
• [[router-tool-selector]]
• [[conversation-clarifying-questions]]