Caseway indicated that the settlement marked a first in the legal tech space
The Canadian Legal Information Institute has settled the copyright infringement suit it filed against artificial intelligence-powered legal assistant Caseway AI in November 2024.
Both parties indicated that the settlement terms were confidential. CanLII said in a statement that both parties would “move forward independently, and both consider the matter fully and finally resolved.” This, CanLII indicated, would be the sole public comment made by both companies.
CanLII had filed the suit in the Supreme Court of British Columbia (proceeding VLC-S-S-247574). It accused Caseway of stealing content from its legal database and putting it behind a paywall.
CanLII’s database includes catalogued court decisions, legislation, and secondary sources and is available to the public for free. CanLII claimed that Caseway’s advertising contained hints that it pulled from CanLII’s content, and that it had gone into CanLII’s website and “coordinated the bulk and systematic download and scraping” of information in a breach of CanLII’s terms of use.
CanLII said it became aware in October 2025 that its content had been included in a cluster with the same IP address used to develop Caseway’s platform. As of November 2024, it said the content amounted to over 120 gigabytes of data and 3.5 million records.
CanLII issued a cease and desist to Caseway, which was ignored. CanLII also claimed that Caseway was incorporated to dodge CanLII’s detection and to transfer the platform to another jurisdiction.
In the settlement statement, CanLII said it would continue “its work providing broad public access to primary legal information. Caseway continues developing technology solutions for organizations that operate in complex, document-heavy environments.”
In its own statement, Caseway confirmed that the settlement would cover all outstanding claims. It described the legal tussle as “one of the most closely watched AI disputes in Canada, and legal tech disputes in the world.”
“This was never just about Caseway versus CanLII. It was about where legal systems and AI is heading. AI is already changing how legal information is accessed and applied at scale. The only real question was whether that shift would be resisted or structured,” Caseway CEO Alistair Vigier said in the statement.
Caseway said the settlement represented a turning point for the coexistence of AI and legal data.
“For the first time in the legal tech space, a dispute of this scale between a legal data institution and an AI company has concluded with a forward-looking resolution rather than a prolonged legal battle,” the company said.
