Major Canadian Legal Research Service Sues AI Startup Claiming Wrongful Use of Its Court Decisions

The Canadian Legal Information Institute, a nonprofit organization that is a major provider of free legal research in Canada, has sued a recently launched AI-powered legal research site called Caseway, alleging that it has unlawfully taken CanLII’s cases in order to build its own system.

But the founder of Caseway, Alistair Vigier, says the allegations are patently false and that his company has not used any data owned or enhanced by CanLII.

“Our AI models use only the pure text directly from court records without modifications or value-added enhancements,” Vigier said. “In fact, prior to the lawsuit, we even included links to CanLII so users could cross-reference the cases for accuracy, which may have caused confusion about how our AI works.”

In Canada, court documents are public records. But in its notice of civil claim filed on Nov. 4, CanLII contends that it holds a copyright on its cases by virtue of the work it puts into enhancing them in order to make them more easily searchable.

“CanLII expends significant time, resources and expertise to review, analyze, curate, aggregate, catalogue, annotate, index and otherwise enhance the Data prior to publishing its original work product … on the CanLII Website,” its lawsuit states.

It makes those cases available to the public subject to a set of terms and conditions set out in its terms of use which, among other things, prohibit the systematic or bulk downloading of its legal materials.

CanLII alleges that Caseway, an Irish company that just launched its Canadian legal research assistant in September, violated these terms and conditions by systematically scraping and downloading materials from its website.

CanLII claims that, on Oct. 3, it was alerted that its cases were found in an open source search engine on a host with an IP address associated with Caseway. While CanLII acknowledges that “a full investigation of the incident is ongoing,” and that “full particulars … are solely within the knowledge and control of the Defendants,” it alleges that the copied works constitute over 120 gigabytes of data and 3.5 million records.

Caseway’s Vigier denies all of this. He asserts that Caseway has not used any data allegedly owned by CanLII. “We did not use any ‘enhancements’ which they may or may not have made. Caseway only uses the original court decisions published from the courts.”

He believes the lawsuit is based entirely on a misunderstanding of something he said to a reporter when Caseway launched. In an article in the Vancouver Tech Journal, he noted that his service provides links to cases on CanLII so that users can verify results. He believes CanLII read that to mean its cases were his data source.

“Prior to the lawsuit, we even included links to CanLII so users could cross-reference the cases for accuracy, which may have caused confusion about how our AI works,” he said. “We are now in the process of uploading our own source documents, which have nothing to do with CanLII.”

As to CanLII’s claims that copies of its cases were found in a location associated with an IP address owned by Caseway, Vigier also denies that.

“As CEO, I have never instructed anyone to copy CanLII’s content, nor has our company stored anything owned by CanLII. In their filing, CanLII openly acknowledges that they don’t actually know what data we possess. Their lawsuit is essentially an attempt to obtain a court order for data discovery without any concrete knowledge of infringement.”

By now, you may be thinking that this lawsuit has echoes of another between two Canadian legal research services, the ongoing litigation between Thomson Reuters, owner of Westlaw, and the now-shuttered AI legal research service ROSS Intelligence.

But while that case involves a battle between two commercial providers of legal research, this one is being brought by a major leader in the global movement for free access to legal materials.

CanLII was founded in 2001 by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada on behalf of its 14 member law societies with a mandate to provide both legal professionals and members of the public with efficient and open online access to judicial decisions and legislative documents. It was a founding member of the Free Access to Law Movement and a signatory to the 2002 Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law.

Vigier says Caseway is likewise committee to access to justice.

“Caseway’s mission aligns with improving public access to legal information, and we are open to collaboration with CanLII and the Law Societies,” he told me. Prior to the lawsuit, he said, he had reached out to various law societies to suggest a partnership between CanLII and Caseway.

However, unlike CanLII, Caseway is not free. The current price of a subscription is $49.99 a month.

Ironically, in what may be yet another example of the Streisand effect, Vigier says that the lawsuit has actually driven new business and opportunities to Caseway.

Since the lawsuit was filed, he said, Caseway has had more than 200 lawyers sign up for its service and had “tons” of venture capital firms reach out.

“Why? Because before the lawsuit, they didn’t know about Caseway,” he said.