Orchestration manages how a request flows through a system: which retrieval runs, what context is assembled, which model handles which step, what verification occurs, and how results combine. It also handles errors and retries.
It is the engineering layer between the user request and the model.
Alternative Names:
Workflow Orchestration, Pipeline Orchestration
Why it Matters?
Orchestration is where most of the quality difference between legal AI products lives, since vendors largely share underlying models. A system that retrieves, generates, verifies citations against sources, and retries on failure produces materially better output than one that retrieves and generates. Because this layer is invisible to buyers, evaluation has to proceed through behavior testing rather than architecture review.
Frequently Confused with
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
Why does orchestration determine quality?
How can buyers evaluate a layer they cannot inspect?
