How evidence becomes a verdict.

§1The six-tier evidence ladder

Every source weighted into a verdict starts with a type-rank in [0.00, 1.00]. The ladder reflects information-architecture quality: primary statutes and case law sit highest because they bind the question itself; synthetic LLM-generated comparables sit lowest because they cannot ground a claim on their own.

T6 sources are never shown as evidence alone. When the only weighted sources are T6, the verdict either declines (OUT OF SCOPE) or labels itself SYNTHETIC-ONLY — for orientation, not action. The label is required by the substrate; it is not a user-toggleable hide. See Constitution §6.2.

§2Source-confidence calculation

Source-confidence is a 0.0–1.0 multiplier on type-rank, computed per-source from three substrate signals:

• Vintage stability — has the source been amended, retracted, or superseded since its last verified citation? Stable sources hold 1.0; recently-amended sources decay until the amendment is digested into the substrate.
• Cross-reference density — how often the source is cited by other T1/T2 sources of the same domain. Sources cited by senior authorities gain confidence; isolated sources lose it.
• Specimen alignment — does the source's stated scope (jurisdiction, time, subject) overlap the question being asked? Out-of-scope sources are downweighted.

Source-confidence is computed deterministically from these signals; we do not let the verdict model self-rate source confidence. The full computation lives in substrate/source-conf.ts and is gated against the test fixtures committed at substrate/__tests__/source-conf.test.ts.

§3Per-claim recency decay

Recency decays linearly, with the decay rate depending on the tier:

• T1 primary statute — published 5+ years ago, not amended: retains 1.0 recency. Statute longevity is a feature, not a bug.
• T2 regulatory guidance — >18 months old without re-confirmation: 0.7. The faster guidance updates, the faster stale guidance decays.
• T3 industry dataset — quarter-by-quarter decay; the latest BLS OEWS quarter retains 1.0, two quarters back decays to 0.85, etc.
• T4 editorial — news cycle decay; same-month source retains 1.0, 6+ months back decays to 0.6.
• T5 forum / crowd — >12 months old: 0.4. Crowd evidence ages fast; today's reddit is rarely yesterday's reddit.
• T6 synthetic — recency irrelevant (already capped at 0.10 type-rank).

§4Worked example

Walk through a real-shape Severance Analyzer computation. Question: is the offered severance package fair?

The verdict's final confidence (0.82) is then mapped to the action-threshold band — here SAFE TO SEND. The reasoning chain shown on the VerdictCard is exactly the source rows above, plus the model-panel votes (§5).

§5Panel routing & vote aggregation

Every verdict is computed by a multi-model panel — minimum 3 LLMs from at least 2 distinct provider suites (e.g. Anthropic + OpenAI + Google). Each model independently consumes the weighted source set and returns its own verdict + per-finding confidence.

The aggregation rules:

• Convergence — ≥2 of 3 models agree on verdict AND each contributing model's per-finding confidence ≥0.80 → SAFE TO SEND
• Soft agreement — ≥2 of 3 models agree but per-finding confidence in [0.50, 0.79] → NEEDS HUMAN REVIEW
• Panel split (1-1-1) — OR ≥1 model returns INSUFFICIENT_CONTEXT → NEEDS HUMAN REVIEW with explicit panel-split disclosure on the card
• Decline-quorum — ≥2 of 3 models return INSUFFICIENT_CONTEXT or OUT_OF_SCOPE → verdict declines (OUT OF SCOPE)
• Disagreement penalty — models disagree AND per-finding confidence varies >0.30 between models → verdict downgraded one band, panel-disagreement footnote required

Per-tool panel composition publishes alongside the first real Track Record cycle (Q3 2026). Model identity is disclosed by suite (Anthropic Opus, Google Gemini-Pro, OpenAI GPT-4o, etc.) on every VerdictCard. Abstentions are shown as abstentions, not hidden.

§6Action thresholds

Confidence scores are never shown as raw percentages without their action label. Per Perplexity-grounded SOTA research: "tie to action thresholds, not raw percentages."

Per-tool thresholds are tuned to that tool's historical Brier — Severance Analyzer's 80% bar is calibrated against its own miss rate. Published per-tool at /trust-v2/track-record.

§7What this methodology does NOT do