Announcing the Blackstone Graph - Isaacus

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Announcing the Blackstone Graph

Umar Butler

June 4, 2026

For most of my life, I’ve been obsessed with two things: law and data. That obsession is what drove me to study law, train my own legal AI models, lead machine learning at a justice agency, and, most recently, start my own foundational legal AI research lab.<br>What I’ve found time and time again is that law and data don’t often play well together. Leaving aside data availability, accessibility, and quality issues (and there are many!), at a fundamental level, law is less a world unto itself and more a process that operates on the world. To truly model law in digital form, you need to model the world itself.<br>Today, I’m announcing the culmination of my life’s work to make law and data get along: the Blackstone Graph. To get your hands on it when it enters closed beta in a couple of months, sign up to the Isaacus Beta Program.<br>A world model for law<br>The Blackstone Graph is a living network of interrelated laws, regulations, cases, people, companies, locations, and other legal and real-world entities, covering every major civil and common law jurisdiction, represented through a new standardized, information-rich legal world model.<br>Blackstone has no analogs. Unlike previous attempts at modeling law, Blackstone considers the fundamental atoms of the world of law to be people, places, and instruments, not legal norms. Under the assumption that law is a process that operates on the world, we have left the inherently normative process of interpreting legal norms to the users of Blackstone: lawyers and agents.<br>Unlike contemporary legal data services, Blackstone will be international, agent-facing, and open from day one. Blackstone’s schema, in particular, will support common, civil, mixed, and even tribal legal systems regardless of their language and jurisdictional peculiarities. At the same time, fundamental, recurring legal concepts have been rigorously standardized to ensure querying and retrieval are ergonomic for humans and agents alike. In the interests of propelling the field of legal research forward, Blackstone’s schema will be made freely available under a commercially permissive open-source license.<br>Finally, unlike other legal standards, Blackstone and its schema will be interoperable with popular legal ontologies and formats, including Akoma Ntoso (AKN), the Federated Open Legal Information Ontology (FOLIO), and Legal Matter Specification Standard (LMSS).<br>Legal data is in disarray<br>In 2026, the year of agents, the state of public legal data remains in disarray.<br>To build Blackstone, we’ve had to index over 400 data sources (and counting) across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore, and EU. In the process, we’ve found some truly egregious examples of missing, incomplete, and inaccessible data. The copy of the Alaska Statutes hosted by the Alaska State Legislature, for example, is two years old and rendered in an interface more befitting of a Bloomberg Terminal. Worse still, the Supreme Court of Victoria does not even host its own judgments, instead directing members of the public to visit AustLII, a private data provider.

An actual page from the Alaska State Legislature’s reproduction of the Alaska Statutes.

Given that one must know the law to be able to comply with it, the general inaccessibility of most legal data is not just an annoyance; rather, it risks corrosion of the rule of law.<br>Today, there are a handful of enterprises holding an oligopoly on high-quality legal data—higher quality even than the data held by the parliaments and courts that actually issue laws and decisions. Lexis, for example, has a more up-to-date copy of the Colorado Revised Statutes than the one hosted by the Colorado General Assembly.<br>Members of the public are therefore pushed to adopt commercial solutions that lock them into subpar interfaces. Startups, in turn, end up totally unable to compete on quality and coverage.<br>Having both built my own legal AI models and spent countless hours at law school scouring through Lexis and Westlaw to find relevant precedent, I know that legal knowledge could be represented and delivered so much better than how it is today. A lack of competition has led to stagnation and complacency.<br>Reimagining the delivery of legal data<br>For three decades, the interface to legal data services had remained the same: a search box. Now, however, legal data is more often being delivered via agents running their own queries, analyzing results, and distilling their findings back to users. That process is similar to how a lawyer might conduct research, yet the interface is fundamentally different. Instead of querying a search box, agents prefer to make API requests, speak to MCP servers, and grep file systems.<br>To get access to the same information lawyers have, agents are being...