UK Case Law Insights

Methodology

Here's how the analytics on this site are produced, and where to be cautious.

Source data

Judgments are downloaded from The National Archives' Find Case Law service as structured LegalDocML/Akoma Ntoso XML, under a computational-analysis licence.

Citations

Case and legislation references are taken from the structured enrichment markup in each judgment, then linked into a citation graph. Some historic references cannot be resolved to a specific judgment and are shown by citation only.

Treatment

How a citing judgment treats a cited case (applied, distinguished, overruled, etc.) is inferred from the citing sentence. The default classifier is rule-based and conservative — it favours precision and labels unclear mentions as a neutral "cited". Treatment labels are indicative; always read the citing judgment.

Influence

The influence score is PageRank over the citation network: a case scores highly when influential cases cite it, not merely when it is cited often.

Outcomes

Appeal outcomes (allowed/dismissed/…) are classified automatically from the concluding paragraphs and are indicative, not authoritative.

Limitations

Coverage is limited to what Find Case Law publishes; automated extraction makes mistakes; and citation counts reflect this dataset, not all of case law. Do not rely on this site for legal decisions — verify against the official judgment.