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hermes-australian-legal

Experimental public prototype for synthetic evaluation. The behavioural benchmark and qualified legal review have not been completed. Prepare Australian deal questions for counsel using dated regulatory sources. Reads selected Commonwealth instruments from a separately cloned local Git corpus, retains compilation commits and caveats, refuses dates outside recorded coverage, checks review prerequisites, calculates explicit hypothetical earn-out scenarios, and checks literal quotations. Preparation for counsel, not legal or tax advice. Disclosure — bounded local Git subprocesses, no shell; reads committed objects and metadata in the operator-selected corpus. No plugin network calls, credentials, telemetry, automatic updates, persistent matter writes or background jobs. The host model can receive supplied clause text and returned source excerpts. Approval fields are user attestations, not authenticated counsel approval or a host-wide permission gate. Quote matching does not verify source authenticity or legal support. The inspected corpus records selected Commonwealth instruments only and ends on 2026-09-01; it does not establish current law, Acts, case law, State law, tax or transaction-specific applicability.

drfinlaymccallToolsv0.1.0Updated 3 hours ago

About

Experimental public prototype for synthetic evaluation. The behavioural benchmark and qualified legal review have not been completed. Prepare Australian deal questions for counsel using dated regulatory sources. Reads selected Commonwealth instruments from a separately cloned local Git corpus, retains compilation commits and caveats, refuses dates outside recorded coverage, checks review prerequisites, calculates explicit hypothetical earn-out scenarios, and checks literal quotations. Preparation for counsel, not legal or tax advice. Disclosure — bounded local Git subprocesses, no shell; reads committed objects and metadata in the operator-selected corpus. No plugin network calls, credentials, telemetry, automatic updates, persistent matter writes or background jobs. The host model can receive supplied clause text and returned source excerpts. Approval fields are user attestations, not authenticated counsel approval or a host-wide permission gate. Quote matching does not verify source authenticity or legal support. The inspected corpus records selected Commonwealth instruments only and ends on 2026-09-01; it does not establish current law, Acts, case law, State law, tax or transaction-specific applicability.

Hermes Australian Legal

By Finlay McCall. A native Hermes prototype for evidence-linked Australian deal preparation.

Read a provision as recorded on a date, retain its caveats, and prepare questions for counsel. This is not legal or tax advice. It is not a complete Australian legal research service and cannot certify privilege, legal applicability, or source authenticity.

Experimental public prototype for synthetic evaluation. The 43-test software suite, historical smoke and one real Hermes tool dispatch passed. The paired behavioural benchmark and qualified legal review are still pending. Do not use this prototype for confidential transactions, legal advice or production reliance. See Release scope.

What works in this prototype

  • Five native tools: corpus coverage, dated provision lookup, review prerequisites, exact-decimal scenario calculation, and literal quote checks.
  • A bundled counsel-preparation skill and /au-legal status command.
  • Read-only local Git evidence with explicit dates, source commits, official Register links, record bounds and caveats.
  • A deterministic refusal for dates after the corpus record ends. An old text is never silently presented as current law.
  • Runnable offline unit tests, synthetic examples, a historical corpus smoke command and an evaluation plan.

No model writes inside the plugin. Hermes's host model writes the narrative. The plugin does more than a prompt: executable checks constrain its own tool outputs, not every other tool or the host model. A skill is not a security sandbox.

Related projects and provenance

  • australian-deal-review: Finlay's original Claude plugin, source workflow for the Hermes adaptation. Source reviewed at ba8e255f59c869a14de0353926724b912506046d, Apache-2.0.
  • australia-regulations: separate derived Commonwealth instruments corpus. The old australia-instruments URL redirects here. The plugin reads its Git data and never executes its scripts. Source reviewed at 1c5a2ebf5c036ef32d91118e2864f48a73c95134.
  • global-law: related wider-law repository, a fork of lexifina/global-law. This plugin does not claim authorship of the upstream global-law project or implement its multi-jurisdiction reader.

See Provenance and Design and workplan. The code uses Apache-2.0. No real deal records or legislation text are bundled in this repository.

Try it without changing your live Hermes

The code targets Python 3.11+ and Git, with no third-party runtime dependencies. This build was exercised on Linux with Python 3.14.9; other platforms and the minimum interpreter remain unverified. The pipe reader uses Unix selector behaviour.

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v
python3 scripts/demo.py
hermes plugins doctor . --ci
hermes plugins validate .

Run a historical evidence check against your own reviewed full corpus clone:

git clone https://github.com/drfinlaymccall/australia-regulations.git ../australia-regulations
python3 scripts/corpus-smoke.py --corpus ../australia-regulations

The clone command downloads public source; it is a deliberate operator setup step, not plugin behaviour. The pinned source manifest records record_to: 2026-09-01 and checked_on: 2026-10-31. A successful 2026-01-01 query does not prove coverage of today's law. The smoke report prints metadata and hashes, not legal conclusions.

Install for a selected Hermes profile

After reviewing the source and a pinned release, use the supported Git installer:

hermes -p default plugins install https://github.com/drfinlaymccall/hermes-australian-legal --no-enable
hermes -p default plugins enable hermes-australian-legal

This installs from the public source repository, not an accepted marketplace listing. To reproduce a reviewed revision, add --ref followed by its full 40-character commit SHA. Restart a CLI session to discover the plugin. Restart a gateway only at an agreed time. Do not enable it across every profile.

For a local development checkout, a directory symlink under the selected profile's plugins/ plus hermes plugins enable is sufficient. Plugin Doctor tests a local path in isolation without installing into a live profile.

In a fresh session, run /au-legal, load hermes-australian-legal:counsel-preparation, and provide the path to the reviewed corpus clone. Every corpus tool requires that path explicitly. Use invented clauses until confidentiality and privilege questions are resolved.

Boundaries and installation disclosures

  • Network: the plugin makes no network calls, starts no MCP server, and has no updater or telemetry. Its Git operations read local data only. The host chat provider can receive clause text and tool output supplied to a conversation. Offline retrieval does not mean confidential AI processing.
  • Reads: the operator-selected corpus clone is outside plugin data. Tools read committed Git objects, tags and corpus metadata. They do not scan mail, client folders, browser profiles, secrets or arbitrary matter files.
  • Processes: bounded git subprocesses, argv only, no shell. No long-lived services, cron jobs or background workers.
  • Writes: tools return JSON only. They do not update a matter register, send an email, file, purchase or modify the corpus. Unit tests create disposable fictional Git repositories. Operator-run scripts print results; report redirection is explicit.
  • Credentials: none requested or stored by this plugin. No .env, auth store, keychain or browser credential access.
  • Legal coverage: selected federal instruments only. Acts, State law, case law and tax need other authoritative sources and qualified review. Derived source history and metadata can be incomplete or wrong.
  • Approval: review-gate booleans are user attestations. This prototype cannot prove counsel signed anything and cannot block unrelated Hermes tools. It does not enforce a legal-practice workflow across the host.
  • Quote checks: literal matching is not verification that a legal proposition follows, that a supplied source is authentic, or that a snippet is sufficient.
  • Arithmetic: one hypothetical capped linear earn-out formula, not a parser for bespoke deal terms. Money inputs must use the same unit and currency. Round-half-even is explicit.

Evaluation and release

See Evaluation plan for the separate software, host, corpus, LLM behaviour and qualified-review gates. Only executed tests belong in Verification. A passing unit suite is not legal validation.

Hackathon preparation contains the entry steps and demo outline. Finlay authorised public prototype release and marketplace submission on 8 November 2026. Catalog acceptance remains with the maintainers. A marketplace PR is separate from a demo post or hackathon form; neither is implied by this release. Production and legal-reliability gates remain open.

README from the reviewed commit 8321447; it updates when the author re-pins.