[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.