Radical Full-Stack Digital Legal Systems: Rules as Code, Paper Plumbing & DocRef

Join Tom Barraclough (Syncopate, Brainbox Institute) with co-founder Hamish Fraser for "Radical Full-Stack Digital Legal Systems", delivered to the Agentics NZ Wellington Meetup on 13 August 2026: what happens when you stop treating law as a pile of documents and start treating it as data.

🔬 In this session:

• Past attempts to turn law into code kept failing the same way. People mapped out the rules on a whiteboard, but never linked any of it back to the actual law, so nobody could check it.
• AI answers have the same problem. Someone shows you a legal answer and you have no way to tell if it's right, because you can't see where it came from.
• Government publishes in Word and PDF. Tools that pull text out of PDFs get it right about 95% of the time, and nobody can tell you which 5% they got wrong.
• The fix: give every clause its own web address that never changes and says which version it is. Then your code can link straight to the law it's based on, and you find out when that law changes.
• And once the law is proper data, people outside government can build things with it too.