Why matter files never enter the open index
Public UK judgments and private matter uploads are different systems on purpose. Mixing them would break the trust bar for firms.
Firms do not want client documents folded into a public legal corpus. That sounds obvious. It is also the first place many AI products go soft: “your data improves the model,” “shared retrieval,” or “workspace memory” that never quite says what is indexed where.
For England & Wales practice the distinction is not academic. Public judgments are meant to be findable and citable. Matter files carry client confidence, privilege, and firm liability. If those two pools mix — even once, even “for embeddings” — the product is asking the firm to trust a boundary it cannot audit.
Two stores, not one clever index
Obiter keeps a hard line. Public Search runs over UK judgments held in Obiter’s own storage under licence. Matter uploads sit in organisation-scoped matter folders. They are not mixed into the open index, and they are not used to train product models.
Public search at /search and the signed-in Search surface share the judgment corpus. That is deliberate: the same paragraph you find without an account is the same stored case page you open in the workspace. Reproducible retrieval is part of the trust story for open law.
Matters and Redact work on matter documents without feeding those files back into the public store. Redact’s job is review and export for disclosure workflows. It does not become a back door into the open corpus.
What “ships today” means here
This boundary is part of what ships today, not a roadmap promise. When we say Search is public and Matters are private, we mean the product enforces separate paths — not that marketing copy hopes they stay separate.
Agent is still in development. Legislation search is on the roadmap as its own Search slice. None of that work gets a free pass to blur matter content into the open index. Verify already runs on matter documents — and stays inside the organisation boundary like everything else matter-scoped.
How to evaluate us on this
If you are diligence-ing the product for a firm, start here. Ask where uploads land. Ask whether matter text is used for training. Ask whether a search hit can ever be a client document. The answers should be boring: matter folder; no; no.
Everything else — drafting assistance, citation checks, redaction review — has to respect the same split: open law that can be cited again next month, and matter work that stays inside the organisation. If that split fails, the rest of the product does not get to look careful.