The Law Library Is Free to Read, and Teams Is in Beta

57,180 judgments from 62 courts, 1885 to today, free to read at miss-lucy.in/judgments. No login, no subscription.

Teams is in beta, with one of the largest company legal teams in the country using it for real work.

Two things are new this month, and I am writing about them together because they come from one decision.

In India you have always paid to read the law. A court decides a case in open court, and the judgment is a public document. Yet to read it, you either pay for a subscription or you go to a free site that gives you a raw copy: a title line, a list of citations, a summary cut off in the middle of a word, and the judgment itself somewhere below, in the broken lines of the PDF it was copied from. At the same time, the expensive part of legal work, the work a company's legal team does on a matter, has had no proper tool. Six people work on one matter with the documents in one person's mailbox, the drafts in another's, and the research in someone's private chat. Reading should cost nothing. The legal work done with it is what is worth paying for.

What is on each judgment page

Each of the 57,180 judgments has its own page. The text is cleaned up: the clutter from the site it came from is removed, and the paragraphs read as paragraphs instead of broken lines. The citations are gathered in one place. 45,782 of the judgments carry two or more citations on the page and 34,853 carry three, so whichever citation you have, you land on the same page. At the top of each page is the ratio decidendi, that is, the rule the judgment lays down. Miss Lucy writes it from the judgment itself. It is not copied from the short summary that publishers print above a judgment, called the headnote.

Arnesh Kumar v State of Bihar, Supreme Court, 2 July 2014. The page carries (2014) 8 SCC 273, 2014 INSC 463, AIR 2014 SC 2756 and [2014] 8 SCR 128. It opens with the rule: for an offence punishable with up to seven years, a police officer cannot arrest just because the officer believes the offence was committed. The officer must be satisfied that the arrest is necessary, and must write down the reasons.

Miss Lucy writes this rule by reading the judgment. It sits above the full text so that you can check it yourself in a minute. If the rule and the judgment disagree, the judgment wins, and I want to know about it: send us the case name in a message and we will fix it.

Look at what people type into Google to reach these pages. The name of a party to a case, or a citation. That is a lawyer checking a citation before it goes into a court document, or a person reading the order in their own case. Neither of them should need a subscription to read what a public court decided in public.

Why the library is free

Miss Lucy is a paid product, and I have no plan to change that. Lawyers use her to research, draft and check their work against these same judgments, and that is how we make our living. The library is what she reads from. What we charge for is what comes next: what later courts have said about a judgment, and what it means for your own case. Every page in the library ends with a way to ask her that. That is where the paid work begins. The reading is free. The judgment itself is not ours to charge for.

Teams is Miss Lucy for the legal team inside a company

Earlier in the summer we started building for the legal department inside a company. It is in beta now. Teams is the same Miss Lucy that individual lawyers already use, arranged for the way a department works. Everyone in the department signs into the same workspace and sees the same work. Each matter has its own space, with its documents, its folders and its own conversation with Miss Lucy, left exactly where the last person stopped. A colleague who picks it up on Monday does not have to work out what was asked on Friday.

Inside one matter. The documents and the conversation are in the same place, and what Miss Lucy produces is filed there, where the rest of the team can find it.

You share a matter by name, from the list of people in your department. There is no link to forward and no "share with everyone". The colleague you share with can read the work and ask Miss Lucy about it, and nothing more. If you stop sharing, they lose access at once.

Teams is not open on the site yet. We set each team up ourselves, a few at a time, and we ask them how work moves between them before they start. A department of six does not work the way a lawyer working alone does, and I would rather learn that from six lawyers than guess. If you run a legal team inside a company, or you work in one, leave your details at miss-lucy.in/teams and we will contact you.

Teams reads from the same free library

Teams does not have a separate set of law behind it. When a legal team asks Miss Lucy what the law is on a point, she reads from the same 57,180 judgments that anyone can open in a browser. The judgment she relies on is there for the senior lawyer reviewing the draft to open, and for the other side to open, because it is public. That is how I think it should be: the law in the open, and the price on the work that turns it into a draft, an opinion or an argument.

What is not finished

The library is not complete and it is not perfect. There are judgments we hold but have not published, because the text, a citation or a date does not meet the standard we set. Some pages do not display as well as I would like. The library grows as the courts deliver new judgments. Teams is a beta with a small number of teams in it, and it will change as they tell us what they find.

Try it yourself

Open the library and type the name of a case you know, or a citation. (2014) 8 SCC 273 will do. Compare the rule at the top with the headnote in your law book. Then press "Research this judgment with Miss Lucy" and ask what later courts have said about it.

I'm Ani, co-founder of Miss Lucy. The library is at miss-lucy.in/judgments, free to anyone with a browser. If you run a legal team inside a company and want a seat in the Teams beta, leave your details at miss-lucy.in/teams.