Powered by the Polyphonic Assertion Ontology™

The intelligence engine behind everything we build.

Two Form Es arrive. Same marriage, same house, same assets. They disagree.

His schedule says the account held £4,180. Her questionnaire says a standing order leaves it monthly and appears nowhere in his disclosure. Three months of statements never arrived and nobody chased them.

That disagreement is not a defect in the material. It is the material. Parties do not produce facts; they produce sworn assertions and evidence, and the conflict between the two is the case.

Why we say evidence, not facts

A fact is something a judge finds, at the end, on the evidence — and even found facts are conditional on honest disclosure. In Sharland and Gohil (2015) the Supreme Court set aside concluded orders because the disclosure beneath them was dishonest. If a court's own findings can fall that way, anything software extracts from that same disclosure and labels a "fact" was never one.

Pivot's job is not to decide what is true but to connect: what he swore, what she swore, what the bank statement and title register show, what the rules required and has not arrived, and what the evidence reveals that nobody asserted. Every assertion is anchored to the box, line or paragraph it came from. Credibility, strategy and settlement stay with the fee earner and the court. That limit is what makes the output signable.

What "polyphonic" means

An ontology is a formal model of a domain, written before the software: ours defines a matter as voices making assertions about entities, supported or contradicted by evidence and tested against obligations.

There is never one narrator. The husband, the wife, the bank whose statements record transactions regardless of what anyone swore, the surveyor whose valuation is an opinion with a date, and the firm whenever a fee earner records a decision. The record holds all of them, unranked and unmerged. A single agreed number flattened out of two has no author, so it cannot be cross-examined, weighed, or checked by whoever signs it.

The unit of record is the assertion, not the document: a Form E decomposes into its sworn assertions, a bank statement into its transactions, a valuation into the opinion it expresses. Nothing is summarised.

Four states, calculated from the disclosure

Pivot computes a state for every account, property, pension, company interest and liability, separately for each party, because each party's account is tested on its own evidence.

| State | What it means |

|---|---|

| Corroborated | Sworn, and independent evidence supports it. Nothing to request. |

| Uncorroborated | Sworn, with no supporting evidence yet. The working list before anything is signed. |

| Contradicted | Evidence conflicts with the sworn account. Both sources cited; what it means is the fee earner's call. |

| Unasserted | The evidence, or the other party's file, reveals something this party never disclosed. |

The fourth exists because silence is invisible to any system that models a case as "what the documents say". States are calculated, never stored, so they cannot drift from the evidence.

A second test runs against the rulebook: the sixteen prescribed Form E categories plus the firm's own additions. It reports what the rules required and has not arrived: statements missing, a valuation aged past twelve months, the P60 the payslips imply. An account can be corroborated while its statements are outstanding, so both answers sit side by side.

Two files, and a record that replays

Each party's account is held and tested as its own file, so your client's disclosure is repaired before the other side sees it. When you decide the time is right, the two merge into one view that shows what separate files cannot: the asset each side describes differently, the account only one disclosed, the direct conflicts. The merge is yours to run, and it links rather than combines.

Nothing is overwritten. Every assertion carries two clocks, when it was true and when it entered the record, so any earlier state reopens exactly as it stood — beside a decision record holding every call your team made, including accepting a gap, with its reason. Years later, that answers a set-aside application or a negligence claim without reconstruction from memory. Form E, ES1, ES2, the chronology and the D81 are computed from the same record, so they cannot contradict one another, and any figure opens to the assertion beneath it.

Two things to be clear about

The model reads your record to draft documents. It does not train on your case data, and no data is shared between firms or matters.

And Pivot does not detect fraud, find hidden assets or establish facts. It connects assertions to evidence and reports absence. Characterisation belongs to the lawyer, which is the part your client is paying for.

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