Understand the role of the tool
Lex helps you find and examine legal material. It does not provide legal advice or take responsibility for the advice, documents or arguments you produce. An AI-generated response may contain errors, omit relevant material or connect a source to a proposition incorrectly.
The client’s circumstances, the evidence and the practical choices in a matter require your assessment. Treat a response as research assistance to be reviewed before use.
Verify the underlying sources
Do more than recognise a case name or inspect a citation’s format. Locate the judgment, statutory provision or commentary and read the relevant passage in context.
- Confirm that the source exists and is accurately identified.
- Check that it supports the proposition attributed to it.
- Distinguish the point decided from other observations.
- Identify whether you are relying on primary authority or secondary analysis.
If a source is unavailable, incomplete or unclear, continue the enquiry through an authoritative source before relying on it.
Check the context and relevant date
Consider the jurisdiction, court, legal framework and facts. Investigate amendments, commencement, repeal and later treatment where relevant. An older source may remain useful; a recent document may still require qualification.
Sri Lanka’s mixed legal heritage makes context especially important. General law, statute and personal-law questions should not be treated as interchangeable. Overseas authorities also require an assessment of their relevance to the local question.
Make uncertainty explicit
An unanswered question is a research task, not permission to assume a result. If no authority is found on the precise point, record the gap. Look for competing interpretations and test the factual assumptions behind a proposed answer.
Do not treat research output as a prediction of a court’s decision. Where appropriate, seek supervision or specialist input. Preserve qualifications when explaining your conclusion to another person.
Consider what you submit
Use only the information needed for the research task. Avoid unnecessary identifying details in an initial question, and consider your obligations before uploading documents or sharing sensitive facts.
Review the Privacy Policy, Terms and relevant service information. Ask the team to clarify data handling for your intended workflow if the answer is unclear.
Keep a reviewable research trail
Record the question, sources consulted, key passages, conclusion and outstanding issues. This helps you revisit the work and enables colleagues or supervisors to follow the reasoning.
If you find a possible source error or coverage gap, contact the Lex team with the citation and a concise description, avoiding unnecessary confidential details. For the research sequence, see How it works.