Enable Oregon Law Help RAG tool for family law queries

[pschipitsch]

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• Refactor
• Feature
• Bug Fix
• Optimization
• Documentation Update
• Infrastructure
• Maintenance

Description

Activates the retrieve_oregon_law_help RAG tool backed by the oregon-law-help-search-2026 Vertex AI datastore. The tool was previously defined but commented out of the registry. When VERTEX_AI_DATASTORE_OREGON_LAW_HELP is set, the agent will use it to answer family law questions (divorce, child custody, child support, domestic relations) alongside the existing housing law tool.

Changes:

• Updated retrieve_oregon_law_help tool description to cover housing and family law
• Registered tool in RAG_TOOL_REGISTRY (auto-activates via env var, no-op if unset)
• Expanded system prompt scope to include family law; added family law search trigger
• Updated .env.example with staging datastore ID reference

Related Tickets & Documents

• Related Issue create RAG for family law from Oregon Law Help website #319
• Closes #

QA Instructions, Screenshots, Recordings

1. Set VERTEX_AI_DATASTORE_OREGON_LAW_HELP=oregon-law-help-search-2026_1775704132316 in backend/.env
2. Start the app and ask a family law question (e.g. "Can I be forced to pay child support?")
3. Confirm retrieve_oregon_law_help appears in LangSmith traces
4. Confirm housing law questions still work as before

Note: retrieve_city_state_laws may also fire on family law questions due to the city law trigger in the system prompt — known behavior.

Added/updated tests?

• Yes — added test_get_active_rag_tools_returns_all_configured_datastores
• No, and this is why: please replace this line with details on why tests have not been included
• I need help with writing tests

Documentation

• If this PR changes the system architecture, Architecture.md has been updated

[optional] Are there any post deployment tasks we need to perform?

Set VERTEX_AI_DATASTORE_OREGON_LAW_HELP in staging environment.

[yangm2]

Unfortunately, this "quickly enable Family Law" on staging got a little complicated.

[yangm2]

We only want this change if the environment variable ENV == staging since we don't want to enable this behavior for TFA on prod.

[yangm2]

Just noticed that we have an inconsistency in how ENV is defined for GitHub environments (staging or prod) and how it is defined in the .env.example file (dev)

[pschipitsch]

Do we intend to set ENV VAR for VERTEX_AI_DATASTORE_OREGON_LAW_HELP in both Staging and Prod?

[yangm2]

uh, when it was just the tenant law pages in that datastore, it would have been for both staging and prod, but right now since it also has family law, it doesn't make sense to turn it on for Prod.

[pschipitsch]

Would it make sense to switch on the existence of VERTEX_AI_DATASTORE_OREGON_LAW_HELP for this feature as opposed to ENV == staging? That way, if this does eventually go to PROD, we would need only set VERTEX_AI_DATASTORE_OREGON_LAW_HELP for that environment, avoiding a code change.

[yangm2]

This part of the system prompt needs to be conditional on ENV

[yangm2]

I think maybe we want to wait for #349 to land so that this will become a bit more straight-forward. What do you think?

[lee-coates]

All of the code is complete to implement the Oregon law help housing and family law tools separately. I tried to instruct the agent to leverage all of the relevant data stores when responding, but unfortunately the results are much worse. I'd appreciate if someone could review the system prompt changes and provide some feedback.