How we work

Editorial policy

A summary is only worth reading if you know how it was made. Here is exactly how ours are made, checked and corrected.

Sourcing

Every judgment comes from Find Case Law, the official public record published by The National Archives. We collect new and revised judgments twice 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.

Writing

Summaries are drafted by a large language model reading the full text of the judgment — the whole thing, not 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 indexed.

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.

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.