SB Intuitions, SoftBank Group’s generative-AI unit, began shipping a court-precedent retrieval bundle to three Tokyo corporations testing retrieval-augmented generation for in-house counsel, pairing chunked judgments from the Supreme Court and selected high courts with citation metadata designed to reduce hallucinated case references. Pilots run on SoftBank’s enterprise cloud tenants with logging enabled for every prompt lawyers submit.
What shipped in the bundle
The dataset includes headnotes and dispositive paragraphs from publicly available judgments through August 2026, tagged by cause of action and overturn status. SB Intuitions engineers said chunks avoid full docket scans that might sweep sealed exhibits; only text courts already publish online enters the index. Each chunk carries a stable URL pointer to the Courts of Japan portal so counsel can open the primary source in one click.
RAG pipelines attach those chunks to SoftBank-hosted large language models fine-tuned for Japanese legal phrasing but not trained to invent citations. When the model drafts a memo, inline footnotes must map to bundle IDs; if similarity scores fall below an internal threshold, the UI returns “no controlling precedent found” rather than guessing.
Who is testing
Participants include a trading house compliance team, a telecom equipment maker’s IP desk, and a regional bank’s litigation unit—all names withheld under NDAs. Each allocated roughly twenty seats for September, with prompts limited to employment, contract, and consumer-finance questions that historically generate repetitive research tasks. SB Intuitions staff sit in weekly review calls to mark answers where lawyers had to correct citations.
SoftBank’s own legal department is not a pilot customer; SB Intuitions wants third-party counsel feedback before marketing externally. Competitors such as LegalOn and NEC’s legal tech arm sell contract review; SB Intuitions is pitching precedent search as an add-on for enterprises already buying SoftBank cloud capacity.
Privacy and governance
Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission has warned companies not to upload employee grievance files into public chatbots. SB Intuitions requires pilots to keep matter-specific facts in segregated buckets with client-side redaction tools; precedent retrieval queries should not include plaintiff names. Logs retention defaults to ninety days unless legal holds extend it.
Lawyers asked whether using RAG on court text counts as republication; SB Intuitions cited courts’ open-data licenses and pointed to academic projects that have indexed judgments for years. Still, pilots must not export bulk chunks to personal laptops—a rule enforced by DLP policies on SoftBank tenants.
Limits counsel should expect
The bundle omits unpublished lower-court trials and foreign precedents. It will not replace Westlaw-style treatises or administrative guidance from ministries. SB Intuitions documentation tells users to verify every citation manually before filing briefs—a disclaimer repeated in bold after a pilot attorney caught a mislabeled overturn flag on a labor case from the 1990s that human editors since fixed.
Latency averages under three seconds for five-chunk answers on domestic data centers; peak-hour slowdowns triggered throttling during a Monday morning test when all three firms ran overlapping queries. Capacity upgrades are scheduled for October.
Commercial path
If pilots succeed, SB Intuitions plans a subscription priced per seat with precedent index updates monthly. SoftBank cloud commitments may bundle inference credits, echoing how the parent sells security appliances. Rivals will watch whether citation accuracy beats simpler keyword search already free on the courts portal.
For in-house teams, the artifact is auditable memo drafts with footnotes tied to real judgments—not autonomous lawyers. For SB Intuitions, the bet is that Japanese enterprises will pay for RAG guardrails on top of models they could otherwise call via API. September evaluations focus on false citation rate, not eloquence.
What careful readers still will not know
Pilots do not disclose which foundation model version runs underneath, and SB Intuitions has not published benchmark scores against human research attorneys. Until those numbers appear, compliance officers should treat the tool as a first-pass indexer, not a filing system. The Supreme Court continues to publish precedents openly; the product’s value is wiring them into enterprise-controlled prompts without leaking client facts to public bots.
