Simon Fraser University researchers have begun work with Vancouver-based legal AI startup Caseway on a research project examining whether large-scale access to court decisions can improve outcomes for people navigating the justice system without lawyers.
Led by Dr. Angel Chang, a professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, the collaboration will study whether making more than 100 million Canadian and U.S. court decisions fully searchable—and usable by modern artificial intelligence systems—helps self-represented and marginalized individuals better understand their legal options. The work is being developed as a Mitacs-funded research initiative.
Caseway is working to publish and index these court decisions in a structured, machine-readable format that can be searched by both humans and large language models such as ChatGPT. The goal is to allow AI systems to reference primary judicial sources directly, rather than relying on secondary material such as blogs, forums, or informal summaries.
“This research is not about replacing lawyers or automating legal advice,” said Chang. “It’s about asking an evidence-based question: if people without lawyers can access accurate, searchable court decisions through AI-powered systems, does that change how they understand their options and make early legal decisions?”
The project builds on related academic collaborations. Caseway is also working with researchers at UBC on a separate two-year legal AI research initiative aimed at combating hallucinations in AI legal research tools, ensuring accuracy by grounding models in court decisions.
Under Chang’s supervision, SFU students are already contributing to early work on search system design, embedding experiments, and evaluation of ranking quality. These efforts are intended to support future human-centered studies on how people interact with AI-assisted legal search tools.
Caseway chief executive Alistair Vigier said the project is about strengthening the data foundations that legal AI depends on. “When AI systems explain the law, they should be able to point to the same decisions judges rely on,” he said.
If successful, the SFU–Caseway collaboration could help shape future standards for publishing legal information in ways that are transparent, verifiable, and accessible to the public.