Empirical legal research often relies on turning research questions into structured data extracted from large collections of rulings and judgments. Designing the extraction schema and then extracting the data remain a manual, expertise-heavy bottleneck. We present schematize, an open-source multi-agent system that interactively turns a researcher’s problem statement into a validated extraction schema that can later be used for autonomous extraction. Schematize couples (i) a clarification dialogue that elicits implicit expert intent, (ii) iterative schema generation, (iii) data-grounded refinement that tests the schema against documents, and (iv) chat-based post-editing. We evaluated the system with human legal professional, introducing our novel methodology, and schematize achieves top performance in most of tested configurations. While the system is designed to be domain-agnostic and applicable to any document collection, we tailor and evaluate it on legal research problems. We release schematize as a pip-installable Python package with full documentation.

Before a tax authority can issue a ruling, it must receive a complete description of the taxpayer’s situation—yet no benchmark measures whether language models can systematically elicit all relevant facts through dialogue.We introduce FSDBench (Factual State Discovery Benchmark), in which a discovery agent questions a simulated taxpayer grounded in a real tax document.The dataset comprises 500 narratives from official Polish tax interpretations, decomposed into 32 874 atomic facts with validated supported precision (97.6%), atomicity (93.8%), and sentence coverage (96.0%).Experiments with four models show that even the best system recovers only 77% of facts on easy samples and under 49% on hard samples after 50 turns.These findings establish conversational fact elicitation as a challenging open problem requiring retrieval-augmented and adaptive questioning strategies.