System prompt adds Canadian legal terminology rules: "Blackline" over "Redline," no "attorneys"

Commit `69d1dc9` extends the Canadian system prompt with two terminology rules and renames the redline parser to match. Small change, but it shows the fork is enforcing Canadian legal idiom at the prompt layer rather than leaving it to convention.

i18n

backend/reasoning/prompts.py gets a new Rule 2: lawyers are "NEVER called attorneys" - use "Lawyer" or "Counsel" - and "Blackline" replaces "Redline" for tracked-changes documents. The commit also renames the import in api/main.py from RedlineParser to BlacklineParser to match.

The existing prompt already carried meaningful Canadian-specific engineering: McGill Guide citation formatting, an SCC/ONCA authority hierarchy (with BCCA/ABCA marked as persuasive), a hard anti-hallucination clause ("I cannot verify this claim with the available CanLII context"), and a professional responsibility reminder referencing the Law Society of Ontario.

The new rules slot in as Rule 2, shifting the others down one. Terminology enforcement in a system prompt is a blunt instrument - there's no validation that the model actually complies - but for a Canadian deployment it's the right place to set the default.

The api/main.py changes are purely mechanical: from backend.retrieval.redline_parser import RedlineParser becomes from backend.retrieval.blackline_parser import BlacklineParser, and the instance is renamed accordingly.

So what Worth a look if you're building for Canadian legal practice and want a reference prompt that covers McGill citations, SCC/ONCA authority hierarchy, and an explicit anti-hallucination guard. The terminology rules themselves are trivially reusable. Low complexity, no backend dependencies.

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Spotted something wrong? Or know the PR text has fresher detail than the writeup above?

Commits in this thread

1 commit from jrklaus8/mike-Canada, oldest first. Source extracted verbatim from the harvested git log.

SHA Subject Author Date
69d1dc9a chore: Enforce Canadian terminology in prompts and update blackline parser imports MikeOSS Bot 2026-05-22 ↗ GitHub

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