LawEngine

Legal research engine

Legal research, engineered for the details that matter.

Find relevant authority. Inspect the source. Put the research to work.

LawEngine brings legal data, retrieval, and source checking into a research engine for people who practice law, study it, teach it, and build technology around it.

Talk to usStart a searchExplore how it works

For people and organizations who are working with the law.

Illustrated research flow

  1. Your matter

    Facts and issues

  2. Relevant authorities

    Cases, statutes, and rules

  3. Research you can work with

    Answer and primary sources

Let's talk research

Who LawEngine helps

Teaching the law, practicing it, or building technology around it? Tell us what the research needs to do.

  • Professors and researchers

    Bring a research question. Explore legal sources, inspect citation and quotation evidence, and discuss research into legal data, retrieval, and AI evaluation.

    Discuss a research collaboration

  • Universities, law schools, and libraries

    Make the research process visible. Explore LawEngine for teaching, research, and institutional evaluation, with source inspection and published research at the center.

    Explore an evaluation

  • Law firms and legal teams

    Move from a matter to relevant authority. Research legal questions, inspect supporting sources, and check covered citations and quotations as part of the workflow.

    Discuss your research workflow

  • Legal technology companies

    Bring us the hard research problem. Discuss source quality, retrieval relevance, citation and quotation checking, and evaluation of legal-AI systems.

    Discuss a technical evaluation
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Also working on your own?

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More under the hood

The work starts before the answer.

Useful legal research depends on the right sources, relevant authorities, and a clear account of what the evidence supports. We build across that process, from legal-source infrastructure and retrieval to source checking and evaluation.

LawEngine is founder-led and built around source records. We bring engineering, legal data, and careful source work to the research process.

A system of legal algorithms, with a little AI sparkle.

See the research method

From matter to research

Frame the problem. Broaden the research. Move forward.

  1. Frame the matter

    Describe the facts, issues, and jurisdiction. Signed in, you can also use a supported document as research context.

  2. Discover relevant authority

    Explore cases, statutes, regulations, and rules within the selected research scope. Look for the authorities and connections that deserve attention.

  3. Develop a grounded answer

    Work with an answer built around retrieved legal material, linked authorities, and available source evidence.

  4. Carry the research forward

    Read the authorities, refine the issue, and use the research in your existing drafting and review process.

Test-drive the EngineVerify legal textBrowse New York regulations

Source library

The source library behind the Engine

10.9 million court-opinion records. 2,202 courts. Our source archive spans all 50 states, D.C., and the federal courts.

State statutes, regulations, and rules vary by state. They go deepest in Illinois and New York, and more states are added as their sources are checked.

Explore research coverage

Source inventory measured October 5, 2026.

  • 10.9 millioncourt-opinion records
  • 2,202courts

The details are the work

Jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Detail by detail.

We are expanding across state and federal sources, with attention to the opinions, statutes, regulations, and local rules that shape the research.

For people working with the law, no detail is too small to matter.

  • Illinois, down to the courthouse.

    Statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, Chicago law, legislative records, and local rules for the Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, and McHenry county circuit courts.

  • New York, with the source trail in view.

    Statutes, covered opinions, New York City legal text, and NYCRR browsing and research with source and review information.

  • Federal law in the research workflow.

    Covered federal opinions, the U.S. Code, CFR/eCFR, and supported federal rules.

Explore the Engine

Coverage varies by jurisdiction and source. See what each practice profile checks.

Show the work

Confidence should come with something to inspect.

Follow the research into its authorities and source text. See the available dates and what a particular check establishes.

Research example · Illinois practice

No exact source-backed match

Question

Under 625 ILCS 5/3-504, "The driver of a vehicle about to enter or cross a highway from an alley, building, private road or driveway shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles approaching on the highway."

Answer

No. Transfer by operation of law[1] concerns vehicle registration after certain changes in ownership, not this right-of-way duty. The correct provision is Vehicle entering highway from private road or driveway[2]. It includes additional words at the end:

Authorities

  1. [1]625 ILCS 5/3-504Transfer by operation of law
  2. [2]625 ILCS 5/11-906Vehicle entering highway from private road or driveway

Opened source · [2]

625 ILCS 5/11-906, Vehicle entering highway from private road or driveway

The driver of a vehicle about to enter or cross a highway from an alley, building, private road or driveway shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles approaching on the highway to be entered.

Source date Nov 21, 2025 · Checked Nov 21, 2025

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Open Search

A green check is useful when you know what it means.

Explore the public benchmark

Published research

The work behind the Engine

  • Reporting · The Illinois Files

    The Paper Trail

    Question
    Where did an Illinois statute come from, and can a lawyer follow it from the bill to the Act?
    Method
    Rebuilt from official Illinois General Assembly sources: 163,006 bills and resolutions (GA93–GA104) and 2,103,427 recorded legislative actions.
    Finding
    88,962 version-level links from Public Acts into the statutes. Where the official records disagree on a date, the conflict is kept and flagged.

    Published July 25, 2026 · Counts as of July 24, 2026

    Read the study

  • Reporting · The Illinois Files

    Half a Million Checks

    Question
    What does a deterministic check find in real court filings, and what can it not check?
    Method
    492,581 citations and quoted passages in 14,997 Illinois court filings, checked against a frozen snapshot of 839,836 sections of law. No language model makes the call.
    Finding
    331 citations across 218 filings flagged for a lawyer's attention, each with a receipt. Citations outside coverage are marked not checked.

    Published July 25, 2026 · Run of July 13, 2026

    Read the study

  • Public benchmark · CiteBench

    The public benchmark

    Question
    Can a system tell whether a quotation matches the authority it cites?
    Method
    A defined task of 500 citation-and-quotation examples with four labels, published with its public pack and submission template.
    Finding
    On this task, LawEngine's deterministic verification scored 500/500 and GPT-5.4-mini scored 361/500. LawEngine defines the reference answers; this is not a blinded head-to-head evaluation.

    500 examples · Four-label task

    Inspect the benchmark
Portrait of Stephen Murphy, founder of LawEngine

The founder

Stephen Murphy successfully petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court to amend Rule 703 in 2026. The Court adopted the change 47 days after his proposal. He builds LawEngine with the same habit: read the source, find the detail, and follow it through.

Read the Rule 703 storyAbout the founder

Put the Engine to work

Bring us the research problem.

Let's scope an evaluation around your questions, relevant sources, and agreed criteria for useful results.

Talk to usTest-drive the Engine