Caseway founder and CEO Alistair Vigier says his company and The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) are moving towards a settlement, just over a year after the online database sued the legaltech startup for copyright infringement.
Vigier told Canadian Lawyer this week that the parties “resolved the major issues [in the case] and agreed on a framework for moving forward beyond the litigation.” Vigier added that he could not comment further on the “settlement” between the parties at this stage.
“[This is] the right way for AI companies and publishers to do it, instead of suing each other.”
Alistair Vigier, Caseway
In an email to BetaKit on Wednesday, Vigier confirmed that “there has been no progress in the litigation” since the lawsuit was filed in November 2024, and that the parties “instead worked on how to resolve our differences.” He added that he sees this form of dispute resolution as “the right way for AI companies and publishers to do it, instead of suing each other.”
CanLII declined to comment.
CanLII, a non-profit organization founded by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, provides an online database of court decisions, legislation, and legal commentary from all Canadian courts.
In the lawsuit, filed in the British Columbia Supreme Court, CanLII alleged that Caseway created a business by wrongfully taking CanLII’s work through a bulk and systemic download from its online database without permission or compensation. The suit added that, in doing so, Caseway breached CanLII’s terms of use and infringed on its copyright. The organization sought an injunction to prevent Caseway from reproducing the allegedly stolen work, as well as monetary damages.
RELATED: Online legal database CanLII sues Caseway AI for copyright infringement
Vigier rebutted CanLII’s claims in a statement to BetaKit at the time, saying that the court documents Caseway is trained on are public record. When asked whether Caseway scraped any documents or data from CanLII, Vigier said then that Caseway “does not use any CanLII data or enhancements,” only the court decisions.
Caseway launched in late 2024 with an AI chatbot touted as a legal research assistant meant to fetch, explain, and summarize Canadian legal information and court decisions. In July 2025, Caseway found traction through an integration deal with AffiniPay, which owns various legal practice management software, including MyCase. Vigier claimed in an email to BetaKit at the time that the deal would see “tens of thousands of law firms” integrate Caseway via MyCase.
Last month, Caseway also announced a partnership with the University of British Columbia on a two-year research project that aims to reduce the amount of false legal information generated by AI tools like Caseway’s. Hundreds of lawyers have been caught using AI tools after false legal cases showed up in their work.
The Caseway lawsuit was just one of the countless legal cases against AI companies at the time, many of which are still ongoing. Canadian news publishers have sued OpenAI, alleging it violated Canadian copyright law in training ChatGPT, while Canadian LLM developer Cohere is facing its own lawsuit from a different group of publishers. In the legaltech world, Burnaby, BC-based legaltech Clio took fellow Canadian company Alexi to court in December over a database at the heart of Clio’s recent AI transformation.
Feature image courtesy Romain Dancre via Unsplash.