The news comes after the startup said it will team up with UBC researchers to combat AI hallucinations
More than a year after nonprofit legal database CanLII filed a lawsuit alleging a Vancouver-based legal tech startup infringed its copyright by scraping its content for commercial use, the startup’s co-founder says the parties “have resolved the major issues [in the case] and agreed on a framework for moving forward beyond the litigation.”
The co-founder, Alistair Vigier, told Canadian Lawyer on Monday he cannot comment further on the “settlement” between the parties at this stage.
CanLII’s media team declined to comment when asked if the nonprofit had settled the lawsuit with Vigier’s company, Caseway. Canadian Lawyer also reached out to the Borden Ladner Gervais LLP lawyer who represented CanLII at the time of the lawsuit’s filing to confirm whether a settlement had been reached, but received an automated message stating she was on leave.
CanLII sued Caseway in the fall of 2024, around the same time that at least two other copyright lawsuits – including one launched by a group of Canadian media companies – alleged major tech companies were unlawfully scraping content to train their generative AI tools. The group of lawsuits raised questions about what constitutes fair game when it comes to the data used to train AI products amid the AI boom.
CanLII provides free access to court decisions and related documents that it annotates, aggregates, indexes, and otherwise enhances for public use. The company alleged Caseway unlawfully copied and reproduced its content, offering it to users for a subscription fee.
Monday’s update comes weeks after Caseway announced a collaboration with a research team in the University of British Columbia’s computer science department. Funded by a two-year grant awarded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, a federal research funding agency, and nonprofit national research organization Mitacs, the project focuses on improving the accuracy of AI legal research tools.
In a Dec. 17 press release, UBC’s computer science department referenced a study published in 2024 showing “that when [large language models] models were prompted with legal queries, they generated content that were inconsistent with legal facts at least 58 percent of the time.”
UBC Computer Science Assistant Professor Vered Shwartz, who leads the research team, told Canadian Lawyer that the project involves using Caseway’s existing AI tools as a jumping-off point. The team will work on improving Caseway’s legal research assistant by developing strategies to detect and mitigate hallucinations and use its findings to produce open-source code that will be freely available to the public.
Caseway will also incorporate the updates into their tools, “so we will see this actually deployed in a real product that people are using,” Shwartz says.
The startup distinguishes its legal research tools from “general-purpose” chatbots like ChatGPT. In a LinkedIn post published in December, Caseway said that instead of “grounding AI in scraped internet content, forums, or social media noise,” the UBC project anchors “AI systems exclusively in real court decisions.”
Asked whether any of these decisions will be sourced from CanLII, Vigier told Canadian Lawyer that Caseway has “always sourced court decisions from publicly accessible locations that do not impose technical or contractual restrictions on access.”
“Our sources include official court and tribunal websites, as well as other openly available online sources,” he adds. “We do not rely on a single source, and never have. A common misconception is that there is only one source for Canadian court decisions. That might have once been the case, but no longer is.”
Shwartz says the UBC project will rely on a combination of data from Caseway and the Access to Algorithmic Justice Project, which is co-hosted by York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Lincoln Alexander School of Law.
Vigier notes that the collaboration with UBC builds on Caseway’s foundation “from an academic and research perspective rather than announcing a new commercial offering.”
Shwartz says she first began talking to Vigier in the summer of 2024, after Caseway contacted UBC about a potential collaboration. The project was granted funding by the end of 2024, but did not launch until September of last year.
After CanLII sued Caseway, Shwartz says UBC reviewed the matter and determined the project could move forward.
Vigier says, "There has been no litigation before the courts, and the matter has had no impact on how Caseway operates, sources data, or provides services.
"We have long since moved on from it, and we do not view it as relevant to the UBC collaboration," he adds.
The CanLII media team declined to comment on Caseway’s collaboration with UBC.
