Legal research software: legal research tools and case law search in plain English
Cases turns a plain-English question into a stack of headnote cards, each a reported US case with a summary, the holding, and a citation you can check in the official reporter. Here is what every plan does.
Informational research, not legal advice. Always verify the citation.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
What it does
Plain-English search, headnote summaries, holdings, and checkable citations
Plain-English search
Ask a legal question the way you would say it out loud. Cases reads what you mean and returns the on-point precedents, so you skip the terms-and-connectors syntax and go straight to reading cases.
Learn more READ - THE HOLDINGSummaries and holdings
A case is only useful once you know what it held. Cases returns each precedent as a headnote card with a plain-English summary and the holding, so you understand how the court ruled without reading the whole opinion first.
Learn more TRUST - REAL CITESVerifiable citations
The biggest fear with legal AI is invented cases. Cases is built the other way: every result maps to a real citation, shown on the card, so you can confirm it in the official reporter before you rely on it.
Learn more PRECEDENT - ON POINTFind precedent
Finding the case that is actually on point is the hard part. Cases does legal precedent search in plain English, surfaces the precedents that address your issue, and shows how courts ruled so you can see whether they help or hurt.
Learn more PLATFORM - FEDERAL + STATEOnline research
Cases is an online legal research platform you can open in a browser and start using today. It covers U.S. federal and state case law, answers plain-English questions, and returns precedents you can read and verify from anywhere.
Learn moreHow it works
Ask in plain English, find the on-point cases, read the holding, verify the citation
Ask in plain English
Type your legal question the way you would say it to a colleague. No boolean, no terms and connectors. Describe the issue, the facts, or the rule you are trying to pin down, and Cases takes it from there.
Cases finds the on-point cases
Cases searches U.S. federal and state case law and returns the precedents that actually address your question, ranked by how on-point they are, as headnote cards rather than a raw boolean result list.
Read the headnote, holding, and citation
Each card gives you a plain-English summary of the case, the holding so you see how the court ruled, and the real citation. You read the point that matters first and decide which cases are worth opening in full.
Verify the citation in the official reporter
Cases shows you the citation so you can confirm it in the official reporter before you rely on it. This is informational research, not legal advice, and the attorney stays the gatekeeper. Always verify the citation.
Where the boundaries are, stated plainly
What this legal research software does, and what it does not
Legal research tools are usually sold as if each one does everything. They do not, and a buyer who knows the boundary before the trial starts makes a much faster decision. Here is ours, including the parts where a bigger platform beats us.
| Capability | In Cases | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Plain-English case law search | Yes | Ask the question the way you would ask a colleague. No Boolean operators, no connectors, no proximity syntax to remember. |
| US federal and state case law | Yes | Federal and state decisions. This is a US research tool and is not built for other jurisdictions. |
| Summary, holding and citation on every result | Yes | You can tell in seconds whether a case is worth opening, and you always have the citation to check it against the reporter. |
| A citator, the way KeyCite or Shepard's works | No | We do not tell you whether a case has been overruled. If your work requires a good-law check before filing, you need a citator alongside this. We would rather say so than imply otherwise. |
| Docket and trial court filings | No | We index decisions, not dockets. For state trial court filings and judge analytics that is a different category of product. |
| Contract review, discovery, drafting | No | Different tools, different buying decision. We map the whole task landscape on our legal AI for lawyers page. |
| Published price, cancel any time | Yes, 29 dollars per month | Most of this market quotes rather than publishes, and the standard contract runs two to three years. Ours is on the pricing page and you can leave. |
Questions buyers ask
Legal research software, answered
What is legal research software?
Legal research software is the tooling lawyers use to find and verify legal authority: case law, statutes, regulations and secondary sources, plus the citator that tells you whether a case is still good law. The category used to mean Westlaw and LexisNexis and little else. It now runs from free federal opinion databases through self-serve tools at 29 to 30 dollars a month to enterprise platforms with negotiated contracts and multi-year terms.
What is the best legal research software?
It depends on whether you need a citator. If you file briefs and must confirm a case has not been overruled, you need Westlaw or LexisNexis, or a tool paired with one, and the price follows from that. If your bottleneck is finding the on-point case in the first place, a plain-English search tool does that job for a fraction of the cost. Most firms are paying enterprise rates for a citator they use on a small share of their research.
How much does legal research software cost?
The published US rates in August 2026 run from 29 dollars per user per month for Cases and 30 for midpage, to 256.75 and 399.75 per user per month for Westlaw Advantage for firms up to ten attorneys, to 499 for Paxton AI. LexisNexis, CoCounsel, Bloomberg Law, vLex and Harvey publish no rate at all. Our legal research pricing page holds every published and reported figure in one table.
Do I need Boolean search to use legal research software?
Not here. Boolean connectors exist because early full-text systems could only match strings, so lawyers learned an operator syntax to compensate. Plain-English search removes that step: you describe the legal question and the facts, and the tool works out what to look for. If you already think in terminated proximity connectors you have not lost anything, but you no longer have to.
Can legal research software replace a law librarian?
No, and firms that have librarians tend to know this best. Software is fast at retrieval and has no view about whether the question was the right question. A librarian reframes the research, knows the secondary sources and spots when a line of authority has quietly moved. What software does replace is the hours of undirected reading between a question and a shortlist.
Is free legal research software good enough?
For finding a federal opinion you already know the name of, often yes: govinfo and CourtListener are genuine public resources. For research where you do not know the case yet, free tools make you do the work the search engine should be doing, and none of them offers a citator. The honest test is what an hour of your time is worth against a monthly subscription, and for most practices that arithmetic settles quickly.
Working out which tool fits: compare legal research platforms side by side, check what each one costs on our legal research pricing breakdown, or read how the major citators compare on accuracy.
Try it on your own question
Ask in plain English and get on-point precedents with summaries, holdings, and citations you can check in the official reporter. Informational research, not legal advice.