Editorial policy

Sourcing

Every judgment comes from Find Case Law, the official public record published by The National Archives. We collect new and revised judgments four times a day and keep the official XML alongside our own text, so a summary can always be traced back to the words of the court. Every case page links to the original.

We digest what Find Case Law sends us, day by day, in the order it arrives, not in the order the courts handed decisions down. Most of the time those two orders agree. Sometimes a court sends a judgment to Find Case Law weeks or months after it was decided, and we publish it the day it reaches us: an older case can appear at the top of a list, or in a weekly PDF, well after its decision date. When the gap is large enough to look like a mistake, the case page and list entry say “Added” with the date we received it, next to the date the court decided it.

What the collection does and does not contain

Find Case Law is not a complete record of the case law of England and Wales, and the material we re-use only partially represents the activities of the courts and tribunals. Its coverage begins in 2001 for some courts and much later for others, some tribunals are only partly represented, and a judgment reaches it only if the court sends it. Nothing we publish can be more complete than that.

So read our practice-area lists as every judgment published on Find Case Law in that area, not as every decision a court reached. The absence of a case here is not evidence that it does not exist, and we draw no conclusion from how many decisions appear in an area, in what period, or on which side they fell. We publish a summary of each judgment on its own; we publish no counts, rankings or trends across judgments, because this collection cannot honestly support them.

Writing

Summaries are drafted by a large language model reading the full text of the judgment, the whole thing rather than an extract, with no access to the internet or to any source beyond the judgment itself. The structure is fixed: facts, decision, issues, reasoning, case history. Legislation is marked up where it is mentioned, so it can be seen at a glance and used to link related cases across the site.

Verification

Each draft is then checked, independently and from scratch, against the judgment: are the facts supported, is the outcome stated accurately, is every authority genuinely cited, is every statutory reference correct, does the reasoning belong to the judge rather than to a party’s submissions? The check produces a score and a list of problems. Anything that does not pass cleanly is rewritten by a stronger model or held back for a human editor. It is not published while it is in doubt.

Corrections

When a court revises a judgment, we notice and re-summarise it; where the change is material, the case page carries a revision note and the correction appears in the next weekly PDF for that area. Every page has a “report an issue” link, and we aim to correct confirmed errors within 48 hours. The previous version of every summary is kept.

How the guides are written

The guides are a different kind of page from a case summary, and they are made differently. A summary describes one judgment. A guide is our own writing about a rule: where it is argued in practice, what the rule actually says, and which points are settled against which are not.

Each one starts from the current text of the rule, practice direction or statute it covers, read in full rather than recalled, and every guide links to that text so you can check it rather than take our word for it. Rule numbers are verified against the current version before publication, because they move: the security for costs conditions became CPR 25.27 in April 2025, and a guide citing the old number would be wrong in a way that is easy to miss. Drafting uses the same language models as the summaries, and the same principle applies, nothing is published while it is in doubt.

Guides carry the date they were published and the date they were last revised, both shown at the top of the article. When a rule changes we revise the guide and move the second date. We do not silently edit a guide and leave the old date in place.

What a guide is not: it is not a commentary on any particular judgment, and it is not advice. Guides are written for practitioners who already know the area and want the awkward edges of a rule set out plainly. They describe how a rule is argued, never what you should do in your case.

What this is not

These summaries are descriptive, never advisory: they tell you what a court decided, not what you should do. They are produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and may contain inaccuracies. They are not a substitute for reading the judgment, and nothing here is legal advice. CaseLawDigest is not affiliated with The National Archives or with the judiciary.