2026 · Hack the Law, Cambridge — 2nd, Legora track
Byte the Evidence — an adversarial negotiation trainer for junior M&A lawyers
An Ace Attorney-style trainer where junior M&A lawyers negotiate against AI opposing counsel — catching the errors it plants and drawing out the facts it hides, from LOI through to signing.
training the skill, not the fluency
A junior M&A lawyer’s job in a negotiation is not to sound confident. It is to notice the clause that is wrong and the fact the other side is not volunteering. Byte the Evidence is built to train exactly that, across a deal from LOI through to signing. It placed 2nd in the Legora track at Hack the Law, Cambridge.
four agents behind one session
- A persona-driven negotiator that plants legal errors and guards hidden facts.
- An adjudicator scoring every turn.
- A phase-boundary coach.
- A final evaluator producing per-clause grades and a debrief of everything you missed.
All four are Google ADK agents coordinated behind a single session, so the user experiences one opponent rather than a pipeline.
the scoring mechanic is the learning objective
Catching a planted error, or drawing out a fact the other side is hiding, is the scoring mechanic — so the trainer rewards the actual skill rather than fluency. You cannot score well by writing confident prose at it.
a demo that could not be broken by an API key
MOCK_LLM=1 returns canned responses for the whole agent graph, so the demo never depended on an API key or a rate limit holding up on the day.