Legal work built on sources, not summaries.

Most legal research still sits behind expensive, closed corpora. That shuts out students, legal aid teams, smaller firms, and anyone who needs a source they can cite again next month.

General-purpose AI makes a different mess: invented cases, mangled quotes, and confident prose with nothing to check. When it goes wrong, the lawyer or firm still carries the risk.

Obiter is infrastructure for both problems: searchable public law, claims you can trace to a paragraph, and matter work that never lands in the open index.

Public search over UK judgments is free on this site, with no account needed. Matters, the editor, Verify, and Redact are in the signed-in workspace.

Verify checks citations, quotations, and authorities against stored sources on matter documents. Redact lets you review every detected span before disclosure and produces a secure redacted PDF. The roadmap says what lands next.

Obiter Research is the published side of the same work: papers and evaluation suites on the retrieval stack the product runs on. Methodology is published when it is ready to defend, and scores only once a suite is frozen.

The desktop app, the web workspace, and the redaction models are being released as open source, so you can read what runs on your machine and what it sends. Search, verification, and stored matters run on our infrastructure, where UK case law is held under licence.

UK case law in Search comes from Find Case Law and related upstream terms, including Open Justice Licence constraints. Client matter files are not mixed into that public corpus.

We do not train on matter content. Hosting, retention, and the obligations that fall on implementers are set out on the Security page.

Research and benchmark pages list papers and suites as we publish them.

Obiter is built by Obiter Research Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (no. 17333423) with its registered office at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. Security reports go to security@useobiter.com; anything else, write to access@useobiter.com or use the links in the footer.