LawDiver launches free legal research and citation-checking platform

LawDiver has launched a free platform that searches more than 10 million U.S. court opinions and checks legal citations against real cases, aiming to curb AI-fabricated citations in briefs. The service is live now at lawdiver.com and includes free caselaw search, citation verification, and developer access during rollout.

Why it matters: - Courts are sanctioning filings that cite cases that do not exist, a risk tied to lawyers using general-purpose AI tools for drafting. - LawDiver is positioning citation checking as a database problem, not a language problem. - The platform gives users a free alternative to paid legal research tools such as Westlaw and Lexis.

What happened: - LawDiver launched a free legal research platform today that searches more than 10 million U.S. federal and state court opinions. - The platform is live at lawdiver.com. - Caselaw search is free and requires no account. - CiteDiver, the citation-checking tool, is free during the initial rollout with a free account.

The details: - The caselaw database includes opinions from the U.S. Supreme Court, federal courts of appeals and district courts, and the appellate and supreme courts of all 50 states. - Users can access full opinion text, official PDFs and AI-generated case summaries. - CiteDiver can upload a PDF or Word brief and check whether each citation exists. - The tool also checks whether the case name matches the reporter citation, whether quoted language appears where cited, and whether the Bluebook form is correct. - CiteDiver includes an audit trail showing what was checked before filing. - Every case carries a treatment signal such as overruled, questioned, distinguished or limited, with the basis for that determination. - Cases not yet evaluated are flagged as unknown and are kept separate from negative treatment so “not yet checked” is not treated as cleared. - LawDiver offers five search modes: citation lookup, case-name matching, boolean keyword search with proximity connectors, semantic vector search and weighted fusion across all four. - The platform includes a developer API and MCP server for legal applications through REST and the Model Context Protocol. - Those developer workflows are free during rollout and do not require a data license.

Between the lines: - LawDiver is trying to make citation verification a core workflow rather than a final manual review step. - The platform’s “verified corpus” pitch is meant to distinguish it from tools that rely on less transparent or less frequently refreshed sources. - The focus on unknown status suggests the company is emphasizing caution over false confidence in cite checking.

What's next: - LawDiver says its free access, cite checking and developer integrations will remain available during the initial rollout. - The company says its corpus will continue to be harvested continuously from court websites, public feeds and government publications. - LawDiver plans to keep expanding coverage across specialty authorities including U.S. Tax Court and IRS guidance, Board of Immigration Appeals precedent, NLRB and SEC adjudications, and PTAB and TTAB decisions.

The bottom line: - LawDiver is betting that legal research users want a free, searchable database plus citation verification in one place, especially as courts crack down on AI-generated fake citations.