What we can —
and can't — do.

What we do well

• Structured legal analysis on civil and commercial questions across England & Wales, the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia.
• Verified case citations against external legal databases (BAILII, CourtListener, AustLII, HKLII, vLex). Fabricated citations are stripped before you see them.
• Procedural pathway, costs estimate, and limitation calculations for the matter types we cover.
• Document review (Advocate / Chambers tiers): pleadings, witness statements, and skeleton arguments analysed against the corpus.
• Multi-jurisdiction comparison when the same facts cross borders.

What we don't do

• Criminal law in any of our jurisdictions. We do not handle criminal prosecution, criminal defence, sentencing analysis, or police-procedure questions. Find a qualified criminal defence lawyer.
• Tax advice or planning. The corpus does not cover the tax code in depth and tax is a domain where small errors compound. Find a tax specialist.
• Immigration applications, asylum, or visa adjudication. Procedure and policy change too quickly for our refresh cadence to be safe.
• Personalised regulated advice. We provide legal information, not legal advice. No solicitor-client relationship is created. Always verify with a qualified practitioner before acting.
• Filing on your behalf. We don't file documents in court, lodge applications, or send letters in your name.
• Conflict checks. If you ask about a specific dispute, we don't know whether you, your firm, or anyone else is conflicted.

Jurisdiction coverage

Coverage is not equal across our five jurisdictions. The corpus is being expanded; this table reflects the current state, with per-jurisdiction authority counts stated as durable floors.

What we shouldn't be used for

• As the only input on a high-stakes filing. Treat the analysis as a thoughtful research assistant's first draft, not as counsel.
• For matters involving children's welfare, capacity, or other vulnerable-person decisions where context matters more than doctrine.
• For ex parte applications where you must satisfy the duty of full and frank disclosure — we cannot know what facts you may have omitted.
• As a substitute for retaining counsel when you face an opposing party with counsel and material exposure.

How fresh is the corpus?

The "Corpus as of" line beneath every chat response shows the most recent last_verified date in our authorities database — the real signal of when the corpus was last refreshed. Statutory amendments and very recent first-instance decisions may not be reflected. For time-critical questions, verify recency.

If we get it wrong

Every response in the chat has a "Report error" button. Clicking it captures the response and your correction into a moderation queue we read. We do not promise to amend the corpus on every report, but we read all of them and feed them into the tagging pipeline.

For a serious or urgent issue, email cases@commonbench.ai.