How to use public UK judgment search
No account required. Lexical search over Obiter’s stored UK judgment corpus, with hits that open stored case pages.
Public Search is served at /search on this site and needs no account. Type a query, get hits against UK judgments Obiter holds, open a stored case page, and read the passage without chasing a PDF across three tabs.
That is the whole job of this surface: make open judgments findable and readable in place. It is not a chatbot. It is not a closed commercial corpus. It is lexical search over a stored judgment collection Obiter holds under licence and serves.
What you are searching
Queries run against UK judgments held in Obiter’s own storage. The signed-in workspace Search surface uses the same retrieval stack. So a researcher on the marketing site and a lawyer in the workspace are not looking at two different worlds for judgments — they share the grounding store.
Hits open stored case pages. That matters for citation work. A result that only deep-links to an upstream PDF is harder to check, and harder to reuse if the upstream page moves. Stable stored pages are how we keep retrieval reproducible.
What it does not cover yet
Legislation and provision-level as-at modelling are not in this Search slice. They are on the roadmap as their own work — not silently missing from the judgment index. If you need statute search today, this product does not pretend to have it.
Verify — citation and quote checks against sources — runs in the signed-in workspace on matter documents. Public Search is the grounding surface those checks stand on. It is not Verify itself.
Matters stay out
Matter uploads never appear in public Search. Client documents and matter outputs stay in organisation-scoped matters. If you need the why, read Why matter files never enter the open index. The short version: open law and matter files are different systems on purpose.
Practical path: use public search at /search, once it opens, when you want judgment retrieval without signing in. Use the workspace when you need matters, Redact, or the rest of the product. Same judgment corpus either way; different jobs on each side of the boundary.