Show HN: OpenJuris – AI legal research with citations from primary sources (opens in new tab)

Same question. This is a massive undertaking to do well, and incumbents Lexis and Westlaw gate API behind their own crappy agent. Unsure about vLex or Bloomberg. What’s the scope? U.S. Federal? State? Administrative hearings?

Part of the value of the incumbents are the case treatment (Sheparidizing) and case issue categories. The world is due for a disruptor, but sadly court data is terrible to get. Bad formats, paygates, slow publishing times, and in some cases physically going to the courthouses

Thanks for asking! We're using a multi-source approach:

Case law: Google Scholar + CourtListener's bulk data (great coverage of federal and state appellate decisions).

Statutes & regulations: Currently using Justia for state statutes, but working on scraping directly from state legislature sites. U.S. Code from the Office of Law Revision Counsel's XML releases, and eCFR's APIs for federal regulations.

To vet correctly, you now need a fortune 500 legal department. Good luck.

You're right - hallucinations aren't limited to citations. We see a few failure modes:

Fabricated citations: Case doesn't exist at all

Wrong citation: Case exists but doesn't say what the model claims

Misattributed holdings: Real case, real holding, but applied incorrectly to the legal question

From our internal testing, proper context engineering significantly reduces hallucination across the board.

Once we ground the model in the relevant source documents, hallucination rates drop substantially.

The lawyer can handle hallucinations by reading the underlying case. For example, "Brady exempts the prosecution from turning over embarassing evidence. See, Brady v. Maryland, 373 US 83 (1963)." If you're a lawyer, you know Brady doesn't say this at all. To be sure, you have to read the case. Errors in the citation are like typos. The must still be corrected, but an occasional typo is not the end of the werld.

It’s called grounding and ChatGPT and Gemini both do it by linking the appropriate sources