Question 1

What is ratio decidendi?

Accepted Answer

Ratio decidendi is Latin for the reason for the decision. It is the binding legal principle a court articulates when deciding a case. Only the ratio creates enforceable precedent under the Indian doctrine of stare decisis.

Question 2

How does Ratio differ from keyword-based legal search?

Accepted Answer

Conventional search returns documents containing keywords. Ratio uses hybrid retrieval (BM25 plus dense vector search), judicial authority weighting, stance detection to isolate holdings, and an autonomous reasoning agent to synthesize grounded answers with verbatim citations from 580,939 indexed passages.

Question 3

What courts are covered?

Accepted Answer

Ratio indexes 10,588 judgments from the Supreme Court of India, all major High Courts, and specialised tribunals (NCLT, NCLAT, ITAT), sourced from the OpenNyAI InJudgements dataset.

Question 4

What retrieval model powers Ratio?

Accepted Answer

BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 for dense retrieval across 580,939 FAISS-indexed chunks, combined with case-sensitive BM25 for statutory citations. A cross-encoder reranker (BAAI/bge-reranker-base) promotes highest-authority passages. This achieves 73.5% Recall@5 and 87.2% MRR on a 313-label benchmark.