AI for legal research
Question / Tech Stack Advice
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What are people’s thoughts on the research functionalities across the different AI tools? Eg Copilot Researcher, Legora deep research, Harvey, Spellbook. Do you have a ‘go to’ tool when it comes to research?
The quality is inconsistent from my experience, for some of my queries one tool did better but sometimes others did better.
I’m also curious about whether they all use the same databases (eg Lexis). If so, how do they differentiate from each other?
Top comments · 6
- 16↑u/CuriousFun477All terrible
- 9↑u/bvc900Only Thomson Reuters, Lexis Nexis and vLex (now Clio) have actual legal databases. The rest are just scrapping public info and not reliable or large enough for research. I believe Lexis is the biggest. No other vendors than themselves has his data, although Harvey have got a partnership with Lexis. My understanding is that it's not the whole database (why would they give it up). My recommendation is stick to the 3 main legal databases as they are the only reliable option.
- 7↑u/Altruistic-Park-7416Westlaw Advantage - not CoCounsel - is excellent
- 5↑u/jicahmusic1They all hallucinate at an alarming rate and cannot be trusted. Read this Harvard study, https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Legal_RAG_Hallucinations.pdf
- 3↑u/klaxceThe attorneys in my firm hated Westlaw CoCounsel, but are very happy with Clio/vLex for AI research. We still have Westlaw Advantage (non AI library) that they use, too.
- 3↑u/TarheelJD3Lexis, TR, and Fastcase are the three who own basically all US law. The others are using things like the Free Law Project, which has been working with OCR'd resources from Harvard, but it is not complete. Most US law is still behind a paywall, and a lot of courts still don't have efiling (had to email one a couple weeks ago to get a few filings). It takes a lot of time and resources to set up the relationships to get law out of these courts, which is why it is so limited. Although I give credit to Free Law Project for all of the work it is doing to make things more accessible on the case law side. Some of the resources you listed are not actually research tools, so you may want to look closer at them. For instance, Harvey cannot do research unless you hook it up to Lexis or your internal documents. Why they keep advertising it as a research tool instead of a knowledge management tool is beyond me. Spellbook is for contract analysis. Regardless of the resource you use, make sure to verify existence of cases and propositions the resource claims are included. So many lawyers (and a few courts) are getting called out and sanctioned because they didn't bother to read the cases and found out they were misrepresented or misquoted by AI.