Matter Ask and the knowledge base it draws on

Ask is a per-matter question box available on Pro and Enterprise. It answers from two sources: the exhibits uploaded to that matter, and Petria's immigration knowledge base of policy material. It does not search the open web. That scope is the point. Ask a question about this beneficiary's record and you get an answer tied to the exhibits, with sources you can check. Ask a question about a policy standard and you get an answer grounded in the Policy Manual, memoranda, and AAO material Petria maintains. What you will not get is a general research assistant that browses.

Each matter has its own conversation. The thread stays with the matter, so you can come back to it, and you can clear a matter's history when you no longer want it; clearing cannot be undone. The second use is staging review: you can attach or paste a document you have not uploaded yet and ask whether it would strengthen the case and what it adds compared to the exhibits already in the record. This is the "is this letter worth chasing" question, answered before the file becomes part of the matter. A staged document is not added to the matter. If the answer is yes, you still upload it properly through evidence, with a label and description, so that drafting and citation verification can use it. There is a limit on how many documents you can attach to a single question, so review them in small batches rather than dumping a folder.

Good questions to bring here: does the record actually support this criterion, and which exhibits carry it; what does the policy standard require for this argument; would this new letter add anything the CV and the existing letters do not; which exhibits are doing the least work in this matter. Ask does not draft, does not run jobs, and does not change the matter. Answers are grounded in the record but are not legal advice or a substitute for your own review, and a confident answer about an exhibit is still worth checking against the exhibit. Questions asked on a matter are recorded in the firm's activity trail on Enterprise.

What Ask draws on, alongside drafting and gap analysis, is a maintained knowledge base of immigration policy material. It is worth knowing what is in it, because that is what determines whether a standard Petria cites is current. On the US side, the base carries USCIS Policy Manual pages across the employment, investor, and humanitarian volumes; USCIS policy memoranda and alerts; a bundled index of AAO deficiency patterns; the text of AAO non-precedent decisions; and summaries of adopted AAO and binding precedent, including the decisions that set the framework for national interest waivers. On the Canadian side, it carries LMIA policy material, the prevailing wage data, and the Job Bank index for LMIA work, plus refugee material including the IRB National Documentation Packages. US country conditions material from the State Department sits alongside the Canadian country of origin sources for humanitarian matters.

Each source refreshes on its own cadence rather than all at once: policy memoranda and alerts daily; Policy Manual pages, AAO deficiency patterns, AAO decision text, and the Canadian LMIA material weekly; adopted and binding precedent summaries, and the refugee, NDP, and country conditions material monthly. The pattern is straightforward: fast-moving announcements are checked most often, the manuals and decision corpus weekly, and the slowest-moving material monthly.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, this is a policy and decision corpus, not case law research and not a live web search, so it will not surface a decision from this morning or a source outside what is seeded. Second, non-precedent AAO decisions are exactly that: they inform where petitions commonly fail, which is why the anticipation report leans on them, but they do not bind an adjudicator. The practical upshot for review: when a draft, an anticipation report, or an Ask answer cites a standard, treat it as a pointer to check rather than a citation to file behind. The base is refreshed on a schedule, not continuously, and a policy change from the last day or two may not be reflected yet.