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 utilize, the startup’s co-founder states the parties “have resolved the major issues [in the case] and agreed on a framework for relocating forward beyond the litigation.”
The co-founder, Alistair Vigier, notified 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 questioned 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 utilized 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 utilize. The company alleged Caseway unlawfully copied and reproduced its content, offering it to utilizers 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 focutilizes 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 displaying “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, notified Canadian Lawyer that the project involves utilizing 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 utilize 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 utilizing,” Shwartz states.
The startup distinguishes its legal research tools from “general-purpose” chatbots like ChatGPT. In a LinkedIn post published in December, Caseway declared 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 notified 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 states 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 states she first launched talking to Vigier in the summer of 2024, after Caseway contacted UBC about a potential collaboration. The project was granted funding by the conclude of 2024, but did not launch until September of last year.
After CanLII sued Caseway, Shwartz states UBC reviewed the matter and determined the project could shift forward.
Vigier states, “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 shiftd 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.
