BAILII vs CourtListener
BAILII
bailii.org
CourtListener
courtlistener.comSide by side
| Figure | BAILII | CourtListener |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $10/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · Legal Research Software | 8.6 (#4) | 8.2 (#10) |
| Audience | BAILII describes use by legal practitioners and their library or knowledge management teams, and its OpenLaw project also addresses law educators, students and librarians. | The project describes CourtListener as serving lawyers, journalists, academics, the public, researchers, and organizations. |
| Founded | 2000 | 2010 |
| Headquarters | Hosted in the UK and Ireland by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, and the Law Faculty, University College Cork | Oakland, California, United States |
| Purpose | BAILII provides free online access to British and Irish primary legal materials. | CourtListener is a free legal research website containing millions of legal opinions from federal and state courts. |
Plans
CourtListener
- Free Tier Non-MembersFree
- Tier 1$10 a month
- Tier 2$25 a month
- Tier 3$50 a month
- Tier 4$100 a month
In their own words
BAILII
BAILII is a free web service for finding British and Irish case law, legislation, European case law, and other legal materials. Readers can search databases by keyword or browse by date and A–Z title list. Search help covers basic, advanced, multidatabase, citation, date, and Boolean searches, including AND, OR, and NOT. LawCite supports searching by citation, parties, court, jurisdiction, article title, author, year, and cases or legislation considered. Collections include case law, legislation, European Union case law, Law Commission reports, and other law-related material. The help section explains printing and downloading documents. BAILII says access requires no password and places no cookies on users’ machines. Its stated beneficiaries include pro bono organisations, neighbourhood law centres, students, and users in developing countries; legal practitioners and educators are also among its audiences. OpenLaw makes selected leading judgments and reports available for legal education. BAILII does not offer an API or permit bulk downloads, and says large-scale downloading may lead to blocked access. It invites commercial users and educational institutions to make annual donations, without specifying an amount.
CourtListener
CourtListener is a web-based legal research service with a searchable archive covering opinions from U.S. federal and state courts, oral arguments, judges, judicial financial records, and federal filings. Its RECAP Archive includes nearly every federal case, hundreds of millions of docket entries, and tens of millions of legal documents. Search tools cover case law, dockets, and citations, and alerts can track topics, people, companies, citations, and other searches. Free Law Project also provides REST APIs, bulk data files, webhooks, database replication, and an MCP server through which AI assistants can access CourtListener data and APIs. The project is built on open source technology. The free non-member plan includes five docket alerts, unlimited daily opinion search alerts, five daily RECAP search alerts, five Pray & Pay requests, and API limits of 5 per minute, 50 per hour, and 125 per day. Paid tiers list higher limits. Complimentary EDU and qualifying LSO memberships are also available.