About
Legal research
shouldn't cost
£400 an hour.
CommonBench is a research instrument built for the people who can't afford one — and the practitioners who need answers faster than billing permits.
Manifesto
The common law is a public inheritance. Yet the ability to read it, cite it, and reason with it is priced like a luxury service.
CommonBench was built because the existing options are broken: generic AI hallucinates citations, and qualified counsel is unaffordable for the people most likely to be sued.
The bet is simple. A curated corpus, a live verification pipeline, and a disciplined prompt architecture can deliver professional-grade analysis in seconds — and never invent a case.
This is not a substitute for a qualified practitioner. It is a research instrument. The output is information, cited to its source, designed to be checked. CommonBench is proud of that distinction and committed to it.
Principles
Four commitments we refuse to soften.
Never invent a case.
Every citation is verified against a public legal database before it reaches your screen. Unverifiable citations are stripped. We would rather return less than return fiction.
Show the working.
Every analytical claim carries a citation. Every citation links to the source. If you can't check our work, we aren't doing ours.
Answer the commercial question.
The question behind every legal question is commercial. We make the exposure, the cost, and the realistic outcome explicit — not buried in a caveat.
Flag what's urgent.
Statutory demands. Limitation periods. Asset dissipation risk. If there's a clock running, we tell you before the analysis begins.
Architecture
How a question becomes
a cited answer.
Every question runs through a staged pipeline: intake, urgency triage, retrieval against 4,600+ curated authorities, live citation verification against BAILII, CourtListener, AustLII, HKLII and vLex, then structured composition. A fabricated citation never survives verification.
Every stage is logged · No fabricated citation reaches output
Trajectory
A short timeline.
Q2 2025 · Genesis
The hallucination problem.
CommonBench began as a response to a specific failure mode: court hearings clogged with AI-fabricated citations no judge had time to verify. The founding constraint has never changed — every authority cited has to exist, has to be retrievable, and has to carry its source.
Q4 2025 · Corpus v1
First 500 verified authorities.
Hand-curated across England & Wales and the US. Every case tagged, summarised, and cross-checked. The verification pipeline ships with it.
Q1 2026 · Public beta
Five jurisdictions, live.
Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia added. First paying users onboarded under the Starter tier.
Q2 2026 · Chambers
Per-seat billing for firms.
Hard isolation between seats. SAML SSO. Direct onboarding. The first firm deployments begin — and the verified corpus passes 4,600 authorities.
Ahead
Drafting, EU, and beyond.
Document drafting service launches end-to-end. EU jurisdictions under evaluation. Additional verification partners in onboarding.
Get in touch
Press, partnerships,
or just curious.
We aim to reply within one business day.
cases@commonbench.ai