What 'Deep Research' Actually Means for a Legal Question

"Deep research" gets used loosely: sometimes it just means a longer prompt, or a chat answer padded out with more paragraphs. Ours means something specific: a multi-step research process that reads the legislation in stages, the way a person actually researching a question would, and hands back a structured report at the end instead of a conversational reply.

A regular CitedAnswers chat question is built for a quick, specific answer: you ask, it retrieves the handful of passages that answer exactly that, and replies in a few sentences. Deep Research is for when the question deserves an actual research session: every relevant Act, the specific sections that matter, the definitions and exceptions that change the answer, and the related questions you'd want to ask next.

How it actually works

It starts with a broad retrieval pass (fifteen passages, not the handful a normal question pulls) cast wide across the jurisdiction's legislation. From what comes back, it identifies which specific Acts got touched, then runs a second, narrower retrieval pass steered directly at those Acts, specifically to surface related provisions and cross-references the first pass didn't catch. For a jurisdiction with linked case law, a third pass searches that separately, kept in its own context so a court judgment never ends up misfiled as legislation.

You see this happen: the progress trail names the actual Acts it's reading ("Reading the Employment Relations Act 2000..."), not a generic spinner, because that's genuinely what's happening at that moment, not a simulated effect layered on afterward.

A report, not a reply

The output is a fixed structure, not a free-form answer: a Quick Answer up front for the 30-second version, then an Executive Summary, Required Steps where the question involves a process, a Relevant Legislation table, and a Relevant Sections breakdown: the 3-5 sections that most directly answer the question, each with the section quoted verbatim and then explained in plain English underneath it, never a citation left to stand on its own.

Past that: Definitions, Exceptions, Related Legislation, Cross References explaining why two sections interact, Practical Examples, a Things People Often Forget list, and Related Questions to Explore: the follow-up questions a real research session would naturally lead to next. Where a jurisdiction has linked case law, a Relevant Case Law section slots in with the same treatment: the court's own words quoted, then explained.

A confidence rating that comes from the research, not the model

Every report opens with a Research Confidence rating (🟢 High, 🟠 Moderate, or 🔴 Limited), and it isn't the model grading its own homework. It's computed directly from what the retrieval actually found: how many distinct Acts and how many passages the research pool drew on before a single word of the report was written. That's a more honest signal than asking a language model how confident it feels, and it's why the number can end up lower than the report itself reads: a report can be well-written and still be built on thin source material, and the rating says so up front rather than letting confident prose paper over it.

Every Act and case actually used is listed at the bottom under Official Sources, each one a real link back to the source text, the same standard every other CitedAnswers feature holds itself to.

Try it now

A Deep Research Report is $9.99 as a one-off through the Legal Marketplace, no account or subscription required, and it's also included unlimited in every paid subscription plan. Ask a real question and watch the research trail work through it live, section by section, before the full report lands.