10-Week Delivery Timeline
Claude-Powered Answer Generation
Source-Cited Answers
Fire Law Publishing (www.firelawpublishing.com) provides trusted legal reference materials for fire departments, fire districts, ambulance services, and public officers across New York State.
Led by Brad Pinsky, a practicing attorney and former firefighter, the company’s publications help emergency service organizations navigate complex laws, policies, procedures, and administrative responsibilities. Through Pinsky Law Group, Brad authored three comprehensive legal reference books covering fire service law and management, secretary and treasurer responsibilities, and New York’s Freedom of Information and Open Meetings laws.
These publications had long served as essential guidance for departments that needed accurate, practical legal information tailored to the fire service. As demand for faster access grew, Fire Law Publishing saw an opportunity to modernize its content while protecting the value of its intellectual property.
The Challenge
Fire Law Publishing’s three books serve legal professionals and administrators across New York’s 2,800 fire departments, while Brad Pinsky has represented more than 500 fire agencies through his legal practice. As customer needs evolved, Fire Law Publishing saw an opportunity to complement its physical publications with a searchable digital experience that could help departments access relevant guidance more efficiently.
The Solution
Definity partnered with Fire Law Publishing to build an AI-powered book assistant and subscription platform grounded in Brad Pinsky’s legal manuals. Subscribers can ask questions in natural language and receive Claude-generated answers based only on the books included in their active subscription. Each response is tied back to the original source material through citations, helping users access trusted legal guidance without relying on generic AI answers.
What Definity Delivered
AI-Powered Legal Assistant
Definity built a custom Claude-powered AI assistant that allows Fire Law Publishing subscribers to ask questions conversationally and receive answers grounded only in the legal books included in their subscription. Using retrieval-augmented generation, the system identifies relevant passages, synthesizes them into clear responses, and keeps every answer tied back to trusted source material.
Built for Grounded, Source-Cited AI
To ensure the assistant could not behave like a generic chatbot, Definity designed Fire Law Publishing’s books as the platform’s only source of truth. The system retrieves only authorized content, avoids unsupported answers, and provides citations with book, section, page, edition, and excerpt details so subscribers can verify responses directly in the original material.
Secure and Flexible Subscription Access
Definity built flexible subscription logic that allows Fire Law Publishing to offer individual book access, multi-book plans, and organization-based memberships. Access is enforced before retrieval, meaning the AI assistant only searches and responds from the materials included in each subscriber’s active plan.
Protected Digital Content
Because the books are valuable intellectual property, Definity created a secure digital reading experience that lets subscribers access the content without being able to copy, paste, or download the full publications. Downloadable forms and templates remain available where needed, giving users practical tools while helping protect the original books.
Marketing Website and Admin Dashboard
Definity also built Fire Law Publishing’s public marketing website and an internal admin dashboard to support the platform as a business. The dashboard gives the team visibility into subscribers, usage, revenue, content, billing, messages, and platform activity, making the product easier to manage and scale.
Claude Code-Accelerated Development
Definity used Claude Code to accelerate development across implementation, testing, prompt refinement, documentation, retrieval improvements, cost analysis, and security review. By combining Claude in the user experience with Claude Code during development, the team delivered a complex AI subscription platform within a focused 10-week timeline.
New Digital Revenue Model
Intellectual Property Protection
Improved Confidence via Citations
Validated Accuracy
Behind the Technology
Two AI models, each doing what it does best
When a subscriber asks a question, two Claude models work in sequence. The first, Claude Haiku 4.5, reads the question and quietly rewrites it two or three different ways, because the way someone phrases a question is rarely the way the law is worded in the book. Asking "can we hold a closed meeting about a personnel issue?" needs to find language written as a prohibition, a definition, and a procedure. Rewriting the question first means the search finds the passage that actually answers it.
The second, Claude Sonnet 4.6, reads the passages that come back and writes the answer in plain language, structured for a busy administrator, with every claim tied to the page it came from.
Definity didn't assume which model to use. The team built a 66-question evaluation set drawn from real fire service questions and tested Claude Sonnet 4.6 head-to-head against two alternatives. Sonnet won on the measure that mattered most: staying inside the source material and refusing to fill gaps with outside knowledge.
Built fast, without cutting corners
Definity used Claude Code throughout the build — for feature development, search tuning, validating the book ingestion pipeline, writing admin documentation, analyzing operating costs, and hardening security. It's the reason a platform of this complexity reached production in ten weeks with the review discipline the subject matter demands.
Cost efficiency was engineered in as well. The instructions that guide every answer are cached rather than re-sent with each question, cutting the per-question cost significantly — which is what makes a flat subscription price work as the platform scales.
The Results
In ten weeks, Fire Law Publishing went from three printed manuals to a live subscription product. What used to require knowing which book to reach for and where to look now takes a sentence — and comes back with the passage, the page, and a link straight to the source. For subscribers, that's faster answers they can verify. For Fire Law Publishing, it's a recurring revenue model built on the same trusted content, with the intellectual property behind it fully protected.
“Definity delivered more than I even asked for. They thought through scalability, the backend dashboard, and business tools I hadn’t even considered, and those details made a real difference.”
Brad Pinsky
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