---
title: "Pivot | Case studies | SurrealDB"
description: "How Pivot models financial disclosure in family law as an assertion graph on SurrealDB, with per-matter permissions and vector search in one engine."
url: https://surrealdb.com/customer/pivot
---

![Pivot logo](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/pivot-white.CiU2edih.svg)

# Legal tech ontology for financial disclosure

**Legal intelligence.** Vertical legal tech for contested domains, beginning with financial disclosure in family law.

**Assertion graph.** What each party and each document says about the same asset, and the disagreement between them.

**One engine.** The graph, the vectors and per-matter access control, in SurrealDB.

1. ![Babcock](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/babcock.lo4rnVg1.svg)
2. ![ING](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/ing.X3I6S3_V.svg)
3. ![British Airways](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/british-airways.KEsZiwV-.svg)
4. ![Nvidia](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/nvidia.DaIEuMil.svg)
5. ![Apple](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/apple.D5pq4flY.svg)
6. ![SpaceX](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/spacex.CQJEk-IL.svg)
7. ![Samsung](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/samsung.CH-vQgnb.svg)
8. ![adidas](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/adidas.DdTC5qhk.svg)
9. ![Tencent](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/tencent.paQmLxyy.svg)
10. ![Alibaba](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/alibaba.B16idgfM.svg)
11. ![PolyAI](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/poly-ai.c3w_fAg6.svg)
12. ![Later](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/later.Ds736jFO.svg)
13. ![Verizon](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/verizon.BI7CajdX.svg)
14. ![Liberty Mutual](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/liberty-mutual.B7qOU1pd.svg)
15. ![Walmart](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/walmart.BjDg_Sr8.svg)
16. ![Carrier](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/carrier.D21gC6NX.svg)
17. ![Saks Fifth Avenue](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/saks-fifth-avenue.COIDpLSb.svg)
18. ![San Francisco Compute Company](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/sfcc.B7jlImq4.svg)
19. ![Shield AI](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/shield-ai.pINZ0KJr.svg)
20. ![Wix](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/wix.DvHhmoBi.svg)

20-40×

Lower token cost per query

0.27s

Retrieval latency, against 3.4s

4

Entity states a fee earner can check

1

Store for the graph and the vectors

Ready to get started?

[Contact sales](https://surrealdb.com/contact/sales)

## Pivot AI made the assertion the unit of analysis and cut retrieval cost 20 to 40 times

Pivot AI builds vertical legal intelligence for contested domains, beginning with financial disclosure in family law. Its assertion graph records what each party and each document says about the same asset, and the disagreement between them, in SurrealDB.

## Challenge

In a financial remedy matter, each party discloses assets and income and the other side tests the disclosure against the documents. The common approach loads a bundle summary into a model's context, and a summary adds a hallucination surface: it can invent or drop material, and the answer inherits the errors with its citations broken.

Omissions fail worst. A summary describes what the documents contain, so a gap in disclosure, the thing the work is looking for, is missed or invented. Pivot concluded the document was the wrong unit of analysis and made the assertion the unit instead.

An assertion carries provenance. A declared salary of £68,000 and payslips totalling £91,000 both persist, each with the voice that made it, the document, the page and bitemporal timestamps. Holding that in a graph store, a vector store and a relational store kept in step by application code meant they could disagree at every boundary.

## Solution

Pivot built the assertion graph on SurrealDB, where an edge is a full record. Voice, source document, page, figure and bitemporal fields sit on the edge, and one SurrealQL statement traverses the graph and reads the record.

Disclosure records are merged after Form E exchange as same_as edges rather than rewrites, so the pre-merge record stays auditable. Table and field permissions are evaluated per record with access denied by default, which gives each matter isolation inside the engine.

Vector search runs inside the same boundary, scoped to one matter's corpus, in the engine that holds the graph. There is no middleware holding an ontology together across stores, because there is one store.

## Results

### Retrieval 20 to 40 times cheaper

Against loading a full disclosure bundle into context, a query retrieves the relevant subgraph at 20 to 40 times lower token cost.

### Retrieval in 0.27 seconds

Against 3.4 seconds for bundle loading.

### Four checkable entity states

Every entity is corroborated, uncorroborated, contradicted or unasserted, each opening to the records behind it, and the fee earner works a queue.

### One store

States are computed at query time, and the graph and the vectors share one engine.

### What is next

Financial remedy is one instance of a shape that recurs across contested law. Pivot is extending the approach across adversarial matters that share it, and looking to SurrealDB Agent Memory as the matter's memory layer, whose versioned history makes a record's time field checkable.

> An assertion edge carries the voice that made it, the document and page it came from, the figure it states and the dates it holds for. SurrealDB stores that as one record and queries it in one statement. We did not write middleware to hold the ontology together, because there is nothing to hold together.

*Jon Aiken, Chief Architect, Pivot AI*

![Pivot](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/pivot-black.Bhqigo_a.svg)

Products used

- [SurrealDB](https://surrealdb.com/surrealdb)
- [Graph and vector](https://surrealdb.com/surrealdb/graph)
- [Agent Memory](https://surrealdb.com/agent-memory)
- [Knowledge graphs](https://surrealdb.com/use-cases/knowledge-graphs)

Legal technology

Assertion graph for financial disclosure

CUSTOMER STORIES

## Proven in production

[See all case studies](https://surrealdb.com/casestudies)

### [Three data stores collapsed into one](https://surrealdb.com/customer/samsung)

![Samsung](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/4c58b81e7b3c9466.C_Hv0eml.svg)

### [An AI assistant for 10,000 technicians](https://surrealdb.com/customer/verizon)

![Verizon](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/18b99996c689000f.B5PQ-nI9.svg)

### [Nine backend tools consolidated into one](https://surrealdb.com/customer/tencent)

![Tencent](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/401d8346058682c8.DqM87mst.svg)

### [Low-latency RAG, under the customer's control](https://surrealdb.com/customer/polyai)

![PolyAI](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/c5fa07c66cd05131.BnC7wHcc.svg)

### [45 million recommendation queries a month](https://surrealdb.com/customer/saks)

![Saks Fifth Avenue](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/saks-fifth-avenue-white.pDJ9HGmf.svg)

THE PLATFORM

## Everything an application and its agents know. Five surfaces, one engine.

Database

Document, graph, vector, time-series and relational in one engine.

![Five data models as dotted tiles: documents, graph, vector, time-series and relational](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/platform-database.Br4lZzhd.avif)

Read more

[Database](https://surrealdb.com/surrealdb)

Agent Memory

What an agent learns, with its source and its time, in the same engine.

![A timeline of remembered facts, each with its source](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/platform-agent-memory.CJS0UhxI.avif)

Read more

[Agent Memory](https://surrealdb.com/agent-memory)

Cloud

Managed clusters in the regions you choose, scaled on demand.

![Clusters in three regions on a world map, each running or scaling](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/platform-cloud.CHvlYnuz.avif)

Read more

[Cloud](https://surrealdb.com/cloud)

Studio

Query, explore and design the schema from the browser.

![A SurrealQL query in Studio and the schema graph under it](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/platform-studio.BRNqvISd.avif)

Read more

[Studio](https://surrealdb.com/studio)

MCP

Every model that speaks MCP reaches the database and the memory directly.

![Three models connected through MCP to the database and Agent Memory](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/platform-mcp.B4puR1DW.avif)

Read more

[MCP](https://surrealdb.com/mcp)

IN PRODUCTION

## Trusted at scale. Samsung, Nvidia, Verizon, Tencent and Walmart run on SurrealDB.

14,000+

Developers building on SurrealDB Cloud

4M+

Developers building on SurrealDB worldwide

FROM THE TEAMS

> SurrealDB gives us a foundation where we can unify semantic search, knowledge graphs, and AI-driven decision making without stitching together multiple systems. Collapsing responsibility into SurrealDB has become our default engineering posture.

*Justin Foley*

VP of Engineering, Later

GET STARTED

## Start building with SurrealDB. One engine for documents, graphs and vectors, from prototype to production.

[Start for free](https://studio.surrealdb.com/current/instances/deploy) [Contact us](https://surrealdb.com/contact)

![ISO 27001](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/iso.BzQy4FFy.svg)

![AICPA SOC 2 Type 2](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/aicpa-soc.CE_YjqhK.svg)

![Cyber Essentials](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/cyber-essentials.CtbmbYfL.svg)

![GDPR](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/gdpr.IadR7loS.svg)

![Cyber Essentials Plus](https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/cyber-essentials-plus.Cl5P05xe.svg)

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