Navigator
An open standard for encoding legal workflows as deterministic, auditable processes.
What Navigator Is
Navigator is a specification for structuring legal work as reproducible workflows. It defines three core primitives — Templates, Notations, and State Machines — that together encode the full lifecycle of a legal matter from intake to delivery.
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 staff review workflow, and a document body. Document bodies use Liquid templating — questionnaire answers are substituted at render time to produce the final document.
Notations
A Notation is a live instance of a Template — one per client engagement. It holds the client's questionnaire answers and tracks the current lifecycle state.
State Machines
State Machines define the valid transitions between Notation states. They are finite paths with explicit entry conditions, preventing a Notation from skipping required steps or moving backward unexpectedly.
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 cliOnce 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.