Terms of service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a contract between you and Obiter Research Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17333423) with its registered office at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ ("we", "us", "our"), for use of the Obiter website, public legal search on that site, and the Obiter workspace and related hosted services (together, the "Services").

By accessing or using the Services, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you use the Services on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that organisation, and "you" includes the organisation.

If you do not agree, do not use the Services.

Obiter provides legal infrastructure for England & Wales, including:

• A marketing site with information, research listings, and public search over UK judgments.
• A signed-in workspace for matters, legal search, and (as released) verification, redaction, and related workflows.
• APIs and software components that support the above.

Features may be labelled beta, preview, or in development. We may add, change, or withdraw features. What ships today is described on the product and roadmap pages; we do not guarantee that any preview UI reflects fully automated production behaviour.

Public judgment search, when available, is open to everyone and needs no account. Accounts are for people aged 18 or over. Where a school, college or university wants supervised access for students under 18, that is provided through an institutional account held by the institution.

• You must be at least 18 years old to hold an account.
• You must use the workspace for lawful professional, research, or institutional purposes. Do not use it for unauthorised practice of law where a licence is required, or for any unlawful purpose.
• You must not use the Services if you are barred from doing so under applicable law or if we have suspended or terminated your access.

Most users take the Services in the course of a business or profession. If you are an individual using them wholly or mainly outside your trade, business, craft or profession, you are a consumer and the following applies to you.

• Nothing in these Terms affects your statutory rights, including your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that services be supplied with reasonable care and skill.
• The limitation of our liability below does not apply to you. Instead we are liable for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach or our failure to use reasonable care and skill, and not for loss that is not foreseeable.
• If you buy a paid plan you have 14 days to cancel under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. If you ask us to start the service within that period, you may be charged for what you have used.
• You can bring proceedings in the courts of the part of the United Kingdom in which you live.

Where a term is unenforceable against you as a consumer, the rest of these Terms continue to apply.

Workspace features require an account. You must provide accurate registration information and keep credentials confidential. You are responsible for activity under your account unless you notify us promptly of unauthorised use.

We may offer access through organisations (for example a firm tenant). Administrators appointed by your organisation may control users, matters, and exports. Conflicts between these Terms and a separate enterprise agreement are resolved in favour of the enterprise agreement for that customer.

We are releasing the source code of the Obiter desktop application, the web workspace, and our redaction models under an open-source licence. Once released, your use of that code is governed by that licence. The hosted Services those applications connect to, including search, verification, and matter storage, are not open source and are provided only under these Terms.

• You may use, copy, modify, and distribute the open-source components on the terms of their licence.
• The open-source components do not include UK case law or any right to access our hosted Services except under these Terms.
• Our name and logo are not licensed with the code. Do not present a modified copy as Obiter or as provided by us.

The licence text is published with the code. These Terms are additional to that licence where you use our hosted Services.

When you use Obiter through our website, API, or workspace that we operate, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the hosted Services for your internal legal work, subject to these Terms.

You may not reverse engineer hosted components except where law expressly permits; scrape or overload the Services; circumvent rate limits or access controls; resell access; or use the Services to build a competing hosted legal research product without our written consent.

Public search on the marketing site is offered without a workspace account. We may apply technical limits (including rate limiting) to protect the corpus and infrastructure.

You retain ownership of matter documents and other content you upload. You grant us the rights necessary to host, process, back up, and display that content solely to provide the Services you request.

• You must have a lawful basis to upload and process personal data about clients and third parties in matters.
• You must not upload malware, unlawful material, or content that infringes intellectual property or privacy rights.
• You are responsible for reviewing outputs (including AI-assisted outputs) before relying on them in legal work.
• Exports and disclosures you make from the workspace are your responsibility.

Our Privacy Policy describes how we handle personal data. Matter content is not added to the public legal search index. See also Compliance for trust boundaries.

UK judgments made available through Search are subject to upstream licence terms, including the National Archives Find Case Law service and the Open Justice Licence. Computational analysis over the full corpus may require separate permissions from the rights holder.

You must comply with applicable licence conditions when reusing, republishing, or performing bulk analysis on corpus material obtained through Obiter. We do not grant you rights in third-party legal texts beyond what those upstream terms allow.

Obiter is a tool for legal professionals and institutions. It does not provide legal advice, and we are not a law firm. Search results, generated text, verification hints, and redaction suggestions may be incomplete or wrong. You must exercise professional judgment and verify sources before filing, advising clients, or making decisions.

We may offer free access during early releases or private beta. If we introduce paid plans, we will present pricing and billing terms before you are charged. Unless stated otherwise, fees are exclusive of VAT and other taxes you owe.

We own the Services, branding, documentation, and underlying technology except for open-source components governed by their own licences and except for content you provide. You may not use our trademarks except as allowed by law or with written permission.

We aim for reliable operation but do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free Services. Maintenance, upgrades, upstream provider outages (including Find Case Law), and security incidents may cause downtime.

How we change these Terms is set out in Changes to these Terms below.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under English law, including death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Subject to that:

• The Services are provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of completeness, accuracy, fitness for a particular matter, or non-infringement, except any implied warranties that cannot be excluded.
• We are not liable for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, or indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the Services.
• If you are a business user, our total liability to you for all claims arising in a twelve-month period relating to the hosted Services is limited to the greater of £100 or the fees you paid us for those Services in that period. This limit does not apply to consumers.

The open-source licence contains its own warranty and liability provisions for software you run under that licence alone.

You will indemnify and hold us harmless against claims, losses, and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these Terms, your content, your misuse of corpus data, or your violation of law, except to the extent caused by our intentional breach or negligence.

You may stop using the Services at any time. We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these Terms, pose a security risk, or if we discontinue a Service. On termination, your licence to use hosted Services ends; we will handle your data as described in the Privacy Policy and any enterprise agreement.

Where you or your organisation upload documents to a matter or to hosted redaction, you are the controller of the personal data in them and we are your processor. That processing is governed by our standard data processing agreement, which applies to every user and forms part of these Terms for those Services and sets out the subject matter, duration, nature and purpose of the processing, the types of personal data and categories of data subject, and our obligations under Article 28 UK GDPR.

• We process matter content only on your documented instructions, unless the law requires otherwise.
• We keep a current list of sub-processors, provide it on request, and give notice of intended changes so that you can object.
• We assist you with data subject requests, breach notification, and any impact assessment you must carry out.
• On termination we delete or return matter content as set out in the agreement.

For everything else described in the Privacy Policy, including your account and this website, we are the controller. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to upload client data and for your own professional duties of confidentiality.

We may change these Terms as the Services and the law change. We will post the new version here with a new version number and date. Where a change materially reduces your rights, we will give account holders at least 30 days notice by email before it takes effect, and you may close your account before then if you do not accept it. Continuing to use the Services after a change takes effect means you accept it.

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that either party may seek injunctive relief in any competent court, and except that a consumer may bring proceedings where they live as set out above.

Questions about these Terms: legal@useobiter.com. Privacy questions and rights requests: privacy@useobiter.com. Security vulnerabilities: security@useobiter.com. Obiter Research Limited, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ.