Navigator

An open standard for encoding legal workflows as deterministic, auditable processes.

https://github.com/neon-law-foundation/Navigator →

What Navigator Is

Navigator is a rule engine for turning Templates, Questionnaires, and Workflows into running Notations. It defines three core primitives — Templates, Notations, and Workflows — that together encode the full lifecycle of a legal matter from intake to delivery.

The same engine is exposed through four surfaces: a command-line tool (navigator), an MCP server for AI assistants, a web form for clients, and an editor for authoring Templates. All four route through one rulebook, so a Notation walked via MCP and a Notation walked via the web form behave identically.

Any legal professional can adopt Navigator. The format is plain Markdown and YAML. No proprietary software required.

Core Components

Templates

A Template is a single Markdown file that contains three things: a client questionnaire, a workflow, and a document body. The document body is plain Markdown with {{question_code}} placeholders — questionnaire answers are substituted at render time to produce the final document.

Notations

A Notation is a Template come to life — one running instance per client engagement, bound to a Person (the respondent) and a Project (the matter). It holds the client's questionnaire answers and tracks the current workflow state.

Workflows

A Workflow is a state machine declared in the Template's YAML frontmatter — named states, transitions keyed by event, a BEGIN and an END. The Template declares; Restate runs. The durable runtime advances a Notation through its workflow and journals every transition so a crashed worker replays to the same terminal state.

Install the CLI

Navigator ships as a single command-line tool, built in Rust and installed via Cargo. Clone the repository, then install the binary into ~/.cargo/bin (already on most users' PATH):

git clone https://github.com/neon-law-foundation/Navigator.git
cd Navigator
cargo install --path cli

Once installed, navigator validate lints any directory of Markdown notations against the Navigator rule set.

See the README for the full prerequisite list (Rust toolchain, Postgres for the in-cluster development loop) and the per-platform breakdown.