[hn_throwaway_99]

> There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies.

I'm not in the legal field, but can someone explain that further? I would have expected that all case law is public access. Not necessarily easy access, but when a judge writes an opinion, why on Earth would that opinion be gated behind a corporation? What am I missing?

[jbstack]

Yes, it sounds crazy and against the principle of open justice, but unfortunately this is the reality. Certainly in the UK which is my jurisdiction - and I believe in the US too although I don't know for sure.

In theory, any member of the public can obtain a judgment by applying for one at the court and paying a fee. That's fine if you just need a one-off judgment, don't mind paying the fee, and you're not in a hurry. It also assumes that you know which case you need.

For realistic legal research, you might need to wade through dozens of cases just to even know if any of them are relevant, you might have a deadline of tomorrow to get it done, and you might not want to pay that fee for a bunch of cases that you aren't going to end up needing. Only a company which already has a comprehensive copy of virtually every important case can help you here.

A typical workflow for a complex piece of legal research might look like this:

1. You need to research a legal topic.

2. Do some Googling, or chat to your LLM, to get a rough overview and some pointers for further research (but don't completely rely on what you find).

3. Read some professional content (e.g. Practical Law articles relevant to the topic, or a legal textbook).

4. Read the relevant legislation.

5. Use a legal database to download all the cases you found from steps 2 and 3 which seem like they might be relevant.

6. Use a legal database to download all the cases which cite the relevant legislative provisions you found in step 4 and seem like they might be relevant.

7. Use the legal database to confirm that those cases are still good law (not overridden or criticised by a later case).

8. Skim read them, discard those that turned out to obviously not be relevant.

9. Read the remaining ones more closely.

10. Note any useful-looking cases which are cited in the ones from step 9, and recursively work your way through those cases as well.

Relying on court-provided copies of judgments won't realistically help you with most of these steps.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Related question, then - what do judges use when they have to write opinions in the first place? Do they have to follow the same process and use Thomson Reuters?

It's obviously even more important for judges (compared to lawyers) to be able to easily search all of the relevant case law to see which cases are controlling and would have precedence. Seems bizarre to me that this critical function would be gated behind a corporation.

[tylervigen]

The other answer (staff who use Westlaw) is right, but critically this is the point of adversarial litigation. The justice system doesn't hang on that judge finding the precedent; it assumes that the highly motivated lawyers on either side will find the relevant precedent that helps their case and highlight it for the judge.

[gadders]

They have staff that do it for them :-)

[ferngodfather]

And those staff mostly use Westlaw :)

[ericmcer]

those steps are what a RAG LLM agent setup excels at.

If tech companies invested 10% of what they have in AI assisted coding tools into AI assisted legal tools, they would be able to do those steps easily.

It is definitely coming.

[jbstack]

You can have as much RAG as you like, but if you're missing the data itself (the legal judgments), it's useless. The fundamental problem here isn't technical, it's that a very small number of corporations have complete control over the source material.

[whattheheckheck]

This all needs to be publicly accessible for free. Gonna see how blatently inconsistent laws and interpretations are

[jbstack]

To be fair, there's sufficient of it publicly available (e.g. on https://www.bailii.org/) that you can easily disprove the conspiracy theory that laws and interpretations are "blatently inconsistent". In fact most judgments are very well thought through and carefully written and cited, because those that aren't tend to be appealed if they are establishing an important principle and getting it wrong. There just isn't enough publicly available to base a full legal AI assistant on.

[eagleal]

Do not know about the US, but some countries publish some type of high profile cases but _only_ after anonimization for obvious privacy reasons.

To access the DB through the modern archive (well modern as new rules) you'd have to be an accredited professional passing through a few legal hardles and digital chancellor's office for each copy. It's like going to a bureaucracy^bureaucracy office.

Some early companies given their initial foothold were not required these checks so they were able to get hold of bigger archives (it's also important to remember often legislation or conformity is done through consulting or lobbying done by these entrenched players).

They can also build on the Data professionals themselves submit.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Do not know about the US, but some countries publish some type of high profile cases but _only_ after anonimization for obvious privacy reasons.

It doesn't work that way in the US. Legal judgements are documents of public record, and they are normally published in full - it's not uncommon to search for someone's name and see legal cases pop up that they have been involved in.

There are specific instances where a judge can seal a judicial record (and records for minors are sealed automatically), someone may petition for their own records to be expunged, and parties may ask for some information to be redacted, but these are normally (except in the case of minors) not done automatically. As I understand it, the US has much more lax rules around the publicity of legal proceedings than other jurisdictions. For example, even though someone is deemed "innocent until proven guilty", arrest records and mugshots are reported all the time in the media even though this would be illegal in many other areas of the world.

[jonners00]

This is great on this topic: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/gatekeepers-of-law-inside...