LegalText Lab

Helping lawyers and law students work confidently with AI and open legal data

What we do

LegalText Lab is a hands-on research and development studio focused on practical, reliable AI for legal work. We build open tools, publish methods, and run experiments that make day-to-day legal research faster, safer, and more transparent—without sacrificing rigor.

Why it matters

Legal practice depends on authoritative sources, precise citations, and careful reasoning. Current AI tools are promising but often opaque, brittle, or hard to trust. We bridge that gap by combining open legal data with reproducible AI workflows, clear evaluation standards, and user-first design.

Focus areas

Natural language to legal queries

Turn plain English into structured API queries with safe defaults and error handling.

Search you can trust

Compare keyword strategies, embeddings, and reranking to deliver results with pinned citations and confidence signals.

"Still good law" checks

Detect treatments (followed, distinguished, overruled) and surface evidence, so you can quickly assess authority.

Multi-agent legal workflows

Orchestrate specialized agents (issue spotter, citation extractor, query planner) to support end-to-end tasks.

Fine-tuning and RAG

Train and evaluate open models for legal reasoning, and pair them with strong retrieval over case law and statutes.

Legislative–case alignment

Connect statutory sections to opinions with versioning and amendment-aware mapping.

What we build

Open-source repos

CLI tools, evaluation harnesses, and example pipelines for research and teaching.

Benchmarks and reports

Transparent model comparisons for issue spotting, citation extraction, and reasoning quality.

Tutorials and guides

Practical walkthroughs for fine-tuning, embedding selection, and multi-agent setups using open data.

Reference datasets

Curated, versioned slices of case law and legislative text for reproducible experiments.

Principles

Open by default

Prefer open models, data, and methods; document tradeoffs and limitations.

Evidence-first

Every result ties back to sources; no ungrounded claims.

Reproducible and measured

Clear metrics, test sets, and audit trails—so improvements are real, not anecdotal.

Safety and privacy

Guardrails against hallucinated citations; thoughtful handling of sensitive data in academic and practice contexts.

Who it's for

Law students

Learn modern AI research techniques with real legal data and workflows you can apply in clinics and journals.

Practitioners

Prototype faster research flows, integrate AI safely, and evaluate tools before they touch client work.

Researchers and builders

Collaborate on open datasets, model training, and evaluation standards for the legal domain.

Get involved

Explore our tools and tutorials
Try the CLI and example workflows
Contribute data, evaluations, or code
Join model shootouts and research sprints

Contact

Questions, collaborations, or pilot requests? Email admin@legaltext.ai and tell us what you're working on. We'll point you to the right tools—or help build them.