About

Legal research
shouldn't cost
£400 an hour.

CommonBench is a research instrument built for the people who can't afford one — and the practitioners who need answers faster than billing permits.

Manifesto

The common law is a public inheritance. The ability to read it, cite it, and reason with it should not be gate-kept by a £400-an-hour billing structure.

We built CommonBench because the existing options are broken: generic AI hallucinates citations, and qualified counsel is unaffordable for the people most likely to be sued.

Our bet is simple. With a curated corpus, a live verification pipeline, and a disciplined prompt architecture, we can deliver professional-grade analysis in seconds — and never invent a case.

This is not a substitute for a qualified practitioner. It is a research instrument. The output is information, cited to its source, designed to be checked. We are proud of that distinction and committed to it.

Principles

Four commitments we refuse to soften.

PRINCIPLE 01

Never invent a case.

Every citation is verified against a public legal database before it reaches your screen. Unverifiable citations are stripped. We would rather return less than return fiction.

PRINCIPLE 02

Show the working.

Every analytical claim carries a citation. Every citation links to the source. If you can't check our work, we aren't doing ours.

PRINCIPLE 03

Answer the commercial question.

"Can I recover?" is the question every client actually asks. Every response with financial figures includes a costs estimate and net-recovery calculation.

PRINCIPLE 04

Flag what's urgent.

Statutory demands. Limitation periods. Asset dissipation risk. If there's a clock running, we tell you before the analysis begins.

Architecture

How a question becomes
a cited answer.

Six stages. A fabricated citation never survives past stage four.

01 · INTAKE Plain-language question Jurisdiction auto-detected
02 · TRIAGE Urgency scan Limitations, statutory demands flagged
03 · RETRIEVE Indexed corpus 2,000+ curated authorities
04 · VERIFY Live citation check BAILII · CourtListener · AustLII · HKLII · vLex
05 · COMPOSE Structured analysis Answer · strength · opponent · next steps
Every stage is logged · No fabricated citation reaches output
Trajectory

A short timeline.

Q2 2025 · Genesis

The hallucination problem.

After watching court hearings clog up with citations no judge had time to verify, the founder set out to build a research engine that refuses to invent. Every authority cited has to exist, has to be retrievable, and has to come with its source.

Q4 2025 · Corpus v1

First 500 verified authorities.

Hand-curated across England & Wales and the US. Every case tagged, summarised, and cross-checked. The verification pipeline ships with it.

Q1 2026 · Public beta

Five jurisdictions, live.

Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia added. The corpus crosses 2,000 authorities. First paying users onboarded under the Starter tier.

Q2 2026 · Chambers

Per-seat billing for firms.

Hard isolation between seats. SAML SSO. Direct onboarding. The first firm deployments begin.

Ahead

Drafting, EU, and beyond.

Document drafting service launches end-to-end. EU jurisdictions under evaluation. Additional verification partners in onboarding.

Get in touch

Press, partnerships,
or just curious.

We answer email like lawyers don't.

cases@commonbench.ai