Searching and asking questions across a whole case

The hard part of a document-heavy case isn't that the evidence is missing — it's that it's buried. The decisive admission is in a call from March; the contradicting figure is in a statement you skimmed weeks ago. Keyword search alone misses it, because people don't say the words you search for. What you want is to ask in plain language and get pointed straight to the passage — with a citation you can verify.

Keyword search vs semantic search

Keyword search finds the literal string. But a witness who "moved money to his brother" won't have written "fraudulent transfer." Semantic search matches on meaning, so a query about hiding assets surfaces the passage about the quiet transfer even though the words differ. For investigative work across messy, real-world language, that difference is everything.

Asking questions — with citations, not vibes

Beyond search, you can ask questions of the case — "what did he say about the account?" — and get a grounded answer assembled from the actual evidence. The non-negotiable feature is citation: every answer must point to the specific recording, message, or document it came from, so you verify it rather than trust it. An answer you can't trace is a lead at best and a liability at worst — the same discipline we wrote about in making evidence verifiable.

An answer without a citation isn't evidence — it's a rumor with good grammar. Always click through to the source.

One case, one search box

The real unlock is that everything lives together. Recordings, transcripts, text messages, photos, financial records — all in one searchable case. A single query runs across all of it, so "every mention of the boat" returns the voicemail, the text, and the line in the bank statement at once, instead of three separate hunts.

How Scribe handles this

In Scribe Verbatim, every recording is transcribed and every document and message indexed, so the whole case is searchable by meaning, not just keywords. Ask a question and get an answer drawn from the evidence with citations to the exact source — transcript line, message, or page — that you click through to confirm. You still do the lawyering; Scribe just makes sure the relevant passage is never more than a search away, and always tied to where it came from.