Legal research tools should show their working.

In the last two years, courts across these islands have dealt with something new: submissions citing cases that do not exist. Practitioners — under pressure, using tools that speak fluently and confidently — filed authorities that no law report has ever contained. The tools weren't lying, exactly. They were doing what they were built to do: produce plausible text. Plausible is not a legal standard.

We think the fix isn't better disclaimers. It's a different contract between the tool and the lawyer: no proposition without a paragraph. Every statement a research tool makes should be pinned to the numbered paragraph of a real judgment — clickable, quotable, checkable in the time it takes to read it. If the tool can't produce the authority, it shouldn't produce the answer.

That's the first half of the contract. The second half is a question every practitioner asks before relying on anything: is it still good law? An authority is not a static object; it lives in the stream of cases that follow it, apply it, distinguish it — or hold it wrongly decided. A citation without its treatment history is a photograph of a person taken years ago: possibly accurate, possibly badly out of date.

So Casefinch is built around a citation graph of the Irish and Northern Irish courts — over one hundred thousand links between judgments, from the Irish High Court's earliest reports to decisions handed down this term. When Casefinch shows you an authority, it shows you its record alongside: who has followed it, who has distinguished it, and whether any court has said it no longer holds.

This is more work than wiring a chat model to a search box. It means the tool sometimes says "I can't support an answer to that" — which a fluent model never says, and a good junior counsel says all the time. We think that's the point. The standard for a research tool shouldn't be how impressive its answers sound. It should be the same standard the profession already applies to people: show your working, cite your authority, and know whether it still stands.

We're onboarding a small number of practices in Ireland and Northern Ireland first. Request early access if that contract sounds like the one you want from your tools.