Under the Hood - SWIRL 5 for Legal | Architecture & the COMPLiQ Vault

Architecture

Three layers. One clean separation.

SWIRL exposes a first-class MCP server. Any AI work surface calls SWIRL for knowledge — ranked, permissioned, and canonically endorsed — while your documents stay in the systems that already hold them.

Your security perimeter · data never leaves

iManage

NetDocuments · M365

SharePoint

Relativity · Court Listen

LexisNexis

Westlaw · Custom APIs

response

Relevance

Three local passes, no vector database.

Legal language is exact: "shall" and "may" are not synonyms, and a defined term is not a loose paraphrase. SWIRL 5 ranks in three passes, each correcting the weakness of the one before, and every pass runs locally.

01

Keyword and BM25

The first pass is lexical. Quoted phrases and exact terms are honored as written, with classic BM25 scoring, so a specific statutory phrase, defined term, or citation finds the documents that actually contain it — not documents merely "about" the topic.

02

Embeddings with hybrid fusion

The second pass adds meaning. SWIRL re-ranks with an embedding model and fuses those scores with the lexical results using reciprocal rank fusion, so a document that uses different words for the same concept can surface, without pushing aside the exact matches from pass one.

03

Cross-encoder

The third pass decides true relevance. A cross-encoder reads the query and each candidate document together, as a pair, rather than comparing two separately made vectors. It is the most expensive pass, which is exactly why SWIRL runs it last, only on the candidates that survived the first two.

No vector database, nothing over the wire. Both models run locally. There is no vector index to build, secure, or keep in sync, and no second copy of privileged material sitting in a store your information-governance policy never contemplated. The documents stay in iManage, Box, or wherever they live; only the ranking happens in SWIRL. Read the full write-up →

COMPLiQ Vault

The on-premises build, in full.

For teams that run everything in-house, SWIRL Legal ships inside the COMPLiQ Vault: a turnkey appliance where the matters, the model, and the answers all stay on hardware you control. Here is what's inside.

The COMPLiQ Vault, a turnkey on-premises AI appliance, with SWIRL Legal inside

Data sovereigntyComplete private deployment on your hardware

TurnkeyPre-configured AI infrastructure

Zero-trustRuntime isolation and workload security

Audit-readyGovernance and compliance controls

What's inside the Vault

Preinstalled stackCOMPLiQ Intelligence Platform, Governance Control Plane, SecureLink, VisionLink (powered by SWIRL), and workflow automation.

AI model suiteGPT-OSS-120B, Llama 70B, and Phi-4, running privately on your own infrastructure.

NVIDIA Grace-BlackwellDual AI systems, 128GB unified memory per node, high-speed interconnect, encrypted storage, rack form factor.

Multi-layer securityPrivate network, encrypted storage, RBAC, enterprise SSO, zero-trust workload isolation, micro-segmentation.

Intelligent task routingPolicy-based workload distribution, interactive vs batch isolation, optimization across compute tiers.

Regulatory alignmentControls aligned to SEC, FINRA, HIPAA, SOC 2, NIST CSF, and the EU AI Act.

SECFINRAHIPAASOC 2NIST CSFEU AI Act