Legal Research
Search API workflows for finding case law, statutes, and secondary legal sources.
The problem
Dedicated legal databases like Westlaw and Lexis are comprehensive but expensive and closed, so a lot of preliminary legal research — finding a recent news article about a ruling, checking whether a statute changed, locating a court's own published opinion — happens on the open web instead, where results aren't organized by jurisdiction or authority the way a legal database is.
How the workflow is built
Queries are built around jurisdiction-specific terms — court name, case citation format, statute number — often scoped with `site:` filters to government domains (`.gov`, court websites) or legal-publisher domains to bias toward authoritative sources over law-firm marketing content. A research agent typically issues a first broad query to locate the right case or statute, then a narrower follow-up query to find citing cases or subsequent amendments.
Example queries
"Smith v. Jones" 2024 opinion site:courtlistener.comCalifornia Civil Code section 1542 current text"overruled" OR "abrogated" "Miranda v. Arizona" subsequent case
Pitfalls to watch for
- Citation formats vary by jurisdiction and court level, and a query built for one format won't reliably surface results indexed under another — this is one of the more jurisdiction-specific gotchas in the whole vertical.
- The single biggest risk is citing case law that's been overturned or superseded; a search result's publish date doesn't tell you whether the holding is still good law, so a citation-checking step against a live source is not optional.
- Paywalled legal databases dominate the highest-authority sources, so open-web search often surfaces secondary commentary (law firm blogs, summaries) rather than primary source text, which needs to be flagged differently in downstream output.