A research tool. Not a lawyer.

CommonBench does not provide legal advice and does not create a lawyer–client relationship. It can help you locate authorities, understand legal concepts, and prepare to engage with your matter, but it cannot weigh the specific facts of a case, exercise professional judgment, assess the strength of a position, or make strategic decisions in the way a qualified lawyer admitted in the relevant jurisdiction can. For any matter of importance, obtain advice from a licensed legal practitioner. Nothing CommonBench produces should be treated as a substitute for that advice.

The corpus covers five jurisdictions and a substantial but bounded set of authorities. It is not a complete record of the law of any jurisdiction. Relevant cases, statutory provisions, secondary materials, or unreported decisions may fall outside it, and the absence of an authority from CommonBench’s results is not evidence that no such authority exists. Treat CommonBench as a strong starting point, not a final word, and corroborate important findings against primary sources and current practice.

Law is not static. Cases are appealed, overruled, or distinguished; legislation is amended or repealed; rules of procedure are revised. The corpus reflects the material available to it as at a point in time and may not capture the most recent developments. Whether a given authority remains good law is a question that requires up-to-date verification, and that responsibility ultimately rests with the user or their adviser.

The verification layer confirms that the authorities CommonBench cites are real and correctly attributed. It does not, and cannot, guarantee that a cited authority has been applied correctly to your situation, that it is the most relevant authority available, or that the legal conclusion drawn from it is sound. Verification addresses the integrity of the citation, not the merit of the argument built on it.

CommonBench relies on language models, which can misread a question, misstate a point of law, or summarise an authority imprecisely. A summary of a case is not the case itself, and a plausible explanation is not a guarantee of accuracy. The platform is engineered to constrain these failure modes — by retrieving real authorities, locking reasoning to the correct jurisdiction, verifying citations, and hedging where confidence is low — but it cannot eliminate them. Read outputs critically and check them against primary sources, especially before they are relied upon in proceedings.

Much of what determines an outcome in litigation lies in procedure — local rules, court-specific practice directions, filing requirements, and deadlines — which vary considerably within and between jurisdictions and change over time. CommonBench can help you understand the substantive law, but it is not a reliable guide to the procedural mechanics of a particular court, registry, or matter. Confirm procedural requirements against the relevant rules and, where the stakes warrant it, with a practitioner.

Because the consequences of error are highest in active litigation, users involved in live proceedings should exercise particular caution. CommonBench is best used to inform and prepare — to understand issues, identify authorities, and frame questions for a lawyer — rather than as the sole basis for steps taken in a case. Decisions with legal consequences should be made with professional advice and verified against authoritative sources.