For the small-business owner staring down a frivolous lawsuit, the rise of Canadian legal AI raises a deceptively simple question. Has a court ruled on this kind of dispute before, and what happened? In Canada, finding the answer can take days. In the United States, it takes seconds.
The CBA just published an article titled “The vexing problem of vexatious litigation.”
That gap is what a Vancouver company called Caseway was built to close.
Canada’s legal data desert
Founded by Alistair Vigier, who served seven years in the Canadian Army and spent five years in divorce law before turning to technology, Caseway argues that the path to a fairer justice system runs through better data. The path runs through the hundreds of thousands of judicial decisions already produced by Canadian courts and scattered across inconsistent, fragmented, often inaccessible publishing systems.
“Judges are paid by the public to write these decisions. The public should be able to read them, search them, and learn from them,” Mr. Vigier said. “Right now, most people can’t.”
Canada’s court records problem has become a familiar refrain among legal technologists, academics, and access-to-justice advocates. About half of Canada’s provinces and territories have no online court search capability at all. In the jurisdictions that do, portals often confirm a record exists without giving the public access to the record itself. Verdicts delivered orally rarely make it onto paper, let alone online. Courts decide individually whether their written decisions are sent to CanLII, the not-for-profit that hosts the country’s free database of rulings.
The result is a country where the principle of precedent, the foundation of common law, operates on incomplete information.
Other countries have moved faster. The United States operates PACER, a federal database holding more than a billion documents. Harvard runs the Caselaw Access Project. France has Judilibre. Britain has the Cambridge Law Corpus. Canada has no equivalent.
A Vancouver bet on automation
Caseway’s product line was designed for that environment. The flagship, Casey, is a research and drafting assistant that pulls from publicly available case law to help lawyers and self-represented litigants quickly locate relevant authority, draft submissions, and stress-test legal arguments.
CaseForm automates the legal forms that bog down small firms, integrating with existing practice management software so partners can spend less time on intake and more time on advocacy. Synthium, the company’s enterprise product, brings the same automation logic to large institutions handling high volumes of structured data.
The common thread, Mr. Vigier said, is treating publicly created information as a public resource.
“We are an automation company. The legal market just happens to be the one with the most broken data infrastructure,” he said. “If you can fix the data, you can fix a lot of the cost problem at the same time.”
Legal fees
The cost problem is real. Canadians routinely report that legal fees price them out of disputes worth pursuing. In landlord and tenant matters, immigration appeals, small claims, and family law, self-representation has become the norm rather than the exception. Family law in particular is a domain where one or both parties almost always show up unrepresented, a pattern Mr. Vigier watched develop during his years practising in Vancouver. The gap between the people who need legal help and those who can afford it continues to widen.
The company operates exclusively through partnerships on a revenue-share model, working with bar associations, legal publishers, and software providers rather than selling directly to law firms. Recent collaborations include a research partnership with Simon Fraser University and a joint project with University of British Columbia computer science professor Vered Shwartz on the reliability of AI-generated legal answers. Caseway has also written publicly about hallucinations in legal AI in Business in Vancouver.
The “Lawfia” fight
That candour has not always been welcomed. In November, 2024, CanLII sued Caseway for copyright infringement, alleging the company had improperly accessed its database. Mr. Vigier, who previously called the lawsuit emblematic of what he describes as a “Lawfia” mentality in Canadian legal data, said the matter has since been resolved. He has used the dispute to make a broader point.
“You cannot claim proprietary rights over the work of judges, paid by the taxpayer, and then tell the public they need permission to learn from it,” he said. “That is the question this country has not answered.”
Critics of the AI-in-law movement have raised legitimate concerns about hallucinations, confidentiality, and the risk that automation entrenches existing inequalities rather than dismantling them. Mr. Vigier said those concerns are why Caseway invests in retrieval grounded in verified sources, partners with academic researchers on accuracy testing, and publishes openly about the limits of the technology.
He also pushes back on the framing that AI threatens lawyers.
“Lawyers who use these tools well will outcompete lawyers who don’t. That is the only real story here,” he said. “The clients still need a lawyer. They just need one whose hourly rate reflects the actual time spent thinking, not the time spent searching.”
Canadian Legal AI: Who actually benefits
For self-represented litigants, the calculus is different. A tenant facing eviction, a small-business owner responding to a demand letter, a parent navigating a custody dispute. None of them can afford to pay a research lawyer to find five comparable cases. AI can do that work in seconds, at a fraction of the cost.
That, Mr. Vigier argues, is what democratizing the law actually looks like in practice.
“The legal system was never supposed to be a vault,” he said. “Caseway is trying to open it back up.”
