Imagine you have five books in front of you and you need to find The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The problem is, all the books have blank covers. So, naturally, you open each one and find the story in the fourth book.
That's easy. It's fast!
But now imagine you have one million books. Maybe even five million. You might not remember the exact words or details. Perhaps you're unsure if the exact story you're picturing even exists.
That's more challenging.
At Modern Legal, we're deeply interested in this kind of search problem—particularly when:
- Specific combinations of facts are needed to form precise arguments.
- Documents are long and detailed.
- Speed helps, but accuracy is far more important.
We think a great search tool should do three simple things well:
- Consistency: Different searches that mean the same thing should produce the same results.
"Cases involving breaches of non-compete clauses."
"Judgments on violations of non-compete agreements."
- Completeness: If we know a case exists, we should find it using any important detail from that case.
"I'm looking for the ruling where a judge considered non-compete agreements for software developers."
- Flexibility: If no exact match exists, we should show results that closely match parts of your query, making sure you're never left empty-handed.
"I'm looking for cases about non-compete clauses, but I'm not sure what the exact wording is."
We're launching three important things:
- The largest publicly accessible collection of legal cases, easy for any lawyer to use.
- Our own advanced search platform specifically designed to help lawyers quickly find relevant and useful cases.
- An API for developers so you can easily build your own legal tools on top of our powerful search engine.
Is that helpful? We believe it will be.
If you're a lawyer, please try our search tool. If we don't yet cover your jurisdiction, reach out—we want to collaborate.
If you're a developer working on legal tech, contact us. We'd love to save you time.
If you're a researcher working on search or related technologies, let's talk. This is an exciting and important challenge.
Modern Legal
Modern Legal is currently a small team with big ambitions. While one day we might grow into something larger, right now we're proud to be a tight-knit group working together on a genuinely interesting and meaningful problem.
In programming, the first program you write is called "Hello World." It marks the beginning of building something wonderful.