Douto — Legal Doctrine Knowledge Agent

Douto

Douto is the legal doctrine knowledge agent for the sens.legal ecosystem. It transforms legal textbooks into searchable, structured, AI-ready knowledge through a five-stage Python pipeline and maintains a navigable skill graph organized by legal domain.

Key Capabilities

Douto’s pipeline processes legal textbooks from PDF to searchable embeddings:

PDF Extraction — converts legal PDFs to structured markdown via LlamaParse
Intelligent Chunking — splits documents using legal-domain heuristics (footnote grouping, law article preservation, running header detection)
LLM Enrichment — classifies each chunk with structured metadata: instituto jurídico, tipo de conteúdo, ramo do direito, fontes normativas
Semantic Embeddings — generates 768-dimensional vectors using Legal-BERTimbau with metadata-enhanced text composition
Hybrid Search — combines semantic search (cosine similarity) with BM25 keyword search and metadata filtering

Current Status

Metric	Value
Books processed	~50
Chunks in corpus	~31,500
Legal domains covered	3 active (Civil, Processual, Empresarial) + 5 planned
Embedding dimensions	768 (Legal-BERTimbau)
Search modes	Semantic, BM25, Hybrid
Test coverage	0%
Pipeline scripts	5
Version	v0.1.0 (pre-release)

Quick Links

Section	Description
Introduction	What Douto is, why it exists, and who uses it
Quickstart	Run a search in under 5 minutes
Architecture	How the pipeline and knowledge base work
Features	Complete feature inventory with status
Roadmap	Where Douto is going — milestones v0.2 through v1.0
Glossary	Legal and technical terminology

Part of sens.legal

Douto is one of five components in the sens.legal unified legal research platform:

graph LR
    subgraph "sens.legal"
        JU["Juca<br/>Frontend Hub<br/>Next.js"]
        VA["Valter<br/>Case Law + Backend<br/>FastAPI + Neo4j"]
        LE["Leci<br/>Legislation<br/>Next.js + PG"]
        DO["Douto<br/>Legal Doctrine<br/>Python Pipeline"]
    end

    USER["Lawyer"] --> JU
    JU --> VA
    JU --> LE
    JU --> DO
    VA <-.->|"embeddings,<br/>knowledge graph"| DO

Agent	Role	Stack
Valter	Case law backend — 23,400+ STJ decisions, 28 MCP tools	FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Qdrant, Neo4j, Redis
Juca	Frontend hub — user interface for lawyers	Next.js 16, block system, briefing progressivo
Leci	Legislation — federal law database	Next.js 15, PostgreSQL, Drizzle
Joseph	Orchestrator — coordinates agents	—
Douto	Legal doctrine — this project	Python 3, LlamaParse, Legal-BERTimbau