The law is public. Access to it is not.
In every common law jurisdiction, the law is a public inheritance: judgments handed down in open court, statutes published, the principles that decide cases there for anyone to read. Putting them to work at the standard a matter demands — quickly, and across more than one jurisdiction — is another thing entirely.
Finding the right authority, reading it correctly, and applying it to the facts is demanding work even for those trained to do it — and the tools meant to support that work have not kept pace with the rest of the profession.
Generative AI promised to close the distance and, in one respect, widened it. A model that returns a confident, well-formatted citation to a case that does not exist leaves the reader worse off than no tool at all. For a practitioner that is not an inconvenience: it is a misstatement to a court, made under their own name.
CommonBench exists to close that gap — rigor and speed, in the same tool.
What we do
CommonBench is a legal research platform for practitioners and the people they serve. It finds the relevant authorities, sets out how the principles fit together, and helps prepare a matter across five common law jurisdictions: the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and the United States.
We use modern AI to make legal research faster than it has ever been — but we treat that technology with discipline. The hardest problem in applying AI to law is not fluency; language models are already fluent. It is trust. A tool that produces confident, well-written answers grounded in cases that do not exist is not merely unhelpful — it is dangerous, the more so for a reader who will put their name to the result. We built CommonBench to solve that problem first.
We do not invent the law.
Every authority CommonBench relies on is drawn from a curated corpus of real, reported cases and legislation, and every citation is checked against that corpus — and, where needed, against free primary-source databases — before it reaches you. Citation integrity is not a feature of CommonBench — it is the foundation the rest of the platform is built on.
Built for the lawyer and the litigant.
CommonBench is built for the practitioner first — the solicitor or barrister who needs an answer that will hold up under scrutiny, and needs it quickly. It serves the individual without a lawyer to exactly the same standard. The questions each puts to the law are the same; we saw no reason to build one tool for the profession and a lesser one for everyone else.
Across common law jurisdictions.
The five systems CommonBench covers share a common inheritance, but each has its own authorities, conventions, and procedure. Our reasoning is locked to the relevant jurisdiction, so the answer you receive reflects the law that actually governs your matter.
Honest about our limits.
CommonBench is a research tool, not a lawyer, and it does not pretend otherwise. We are explicit about what it can and cannot do, because a tool that informs real decisions has an obligation to be candid about where its responsibility ends and a practitioner’s judgment begins.
CommonBench serves those who must get the law right without the resources a large firm takes for granted — commercial solicitors and barristers working across jurisdictions, smaller practices and advice services, students, and the litigant handling a matter without representation. What they share is a need to get it right, under time and pressure.
Access to justice is hollow without access to the law itself.
Integrity matters more than confidence — a tool that admits uncertainty is worth more than one that conceals it.
Technology should widen the door to the legal system, not build a new wall in front of it.
Getting these things right is not optional. The work CommonBench supports — a position taken in front of a court, advice a client will act on — leaves little room for error. That is precisely why the standard has to be high.
CommonBench is a research tool and does not provide legal advice or create a lawyer–client relationship. For advice on a specific matter, consult a qualified legal practitioner in the relevant jurisdiction.