Online legal database CanLII and AI startup Caseway settle copyright dispute

The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) and Vancouver-based AI startup Caseway AI have settled their copyright dispute.

In November 2024, CanLII filed a lawsuit in the British Columbia Supreme Court alleging 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. On Friday, Caseway and CanLII announced they had “resolved all matters arising from the proceeding.”

“The settlement resolves all outstanding claims and establishes a path forward that reflects the realities of modern AI development.”

CanLII is a non-profit organization founded by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada that provides an online database of court decisions, legislation, and legal commentary from all Canadian courts. 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.

The settlement follows Caseway CEO Alistair Vigier saying that the parties had “resolved the major issues” in the case back in January.

Terms of the settlement are confidential, but a CanLII blog post announcing the settlement said that CanLII “continues its work providing broad public access to primary legal information,” while Caseway “continues developing technology solutions for organizations that operate in complex, document-heavy environments.”

“Each will move forward independently, and both consider the matter fully and finally resolved,” the blog post reads, adding that the post “reflects the complete and final position of both parties” and will serve as the only public comment made by either organization.

Despite this, a Caseway news release said that “the outcome represents a clear shift away from attempting to slow technological progress through litigation and toward defining how it can operate within established systems.”

“The settlement resolves all outstanding claims and establishes a path forward that reflects the realities of modern AI development,” Caseway said in the release. “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.”

When it was launched, the lawsuit against Caseway was just one of many legal actions taken against AI companies, 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.