SFU prof launches legal-AI collaboration with Caseway to improve access to justice - School of Computing Science - Simon Fraser University
School of Computing Science<br>News & Events<br>News<br>2026<br>SFU prof launches legal-AI collaboration with Caseway to improve access to justice
School of Computing Science
About<br>Message From the Director<br>Industry Relations MPCS Advisory Council
Job Opportunities<br>Diversity in CS Diversity Committee Webinars<br>Awards and Project Presentations<br>2026 Explore Computing Science Research
Contact Us<br>CS Intranet
People<br>Leadership<br>Faculty<br>Staff
Future Students<br>Undergraduates<br>Graduates
Current Students<br>Undergraduates Program Requirements<br>Forms<br>Policies<br>Co-op<br>Student Resources Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA)<br>Academic Enhancement Program (AEP) AEP in the News!
Computing Science Peer Tutoring Meet your CS Peer Tutors
Research Opportunities<br>Undergraduate Project Showcase<br>Frequently Asked Questions
Graduates Program Requirements<br>Policies<br>Forms<br>Financial Support<br>Resources<br>Supervisory Committee<br>Thesis & Defence<br>Internships & Co-op MPCS Co-op<br>Industrial Internships
Teaching Assistantships
Student Life
Research<br>Areas<br>Labs<br>Centres & Institutes<br>Chairs<br>Awards Nominations for CS Excellence in Teaching Awards<br>Best Paper Award
Seminars Distinguished Lecture Series<br>Industry Talks Series<br>VCR/AI
News & Events<br>News<br>Events ICPC Programming Contest About ICPC<br>ICPC PACNW | SFU
Support<br>CSIL Linux/UNIX FAQ CSIL Linux/Unix Known Issues<br>Network Lab FAQ
CSIL Remote Access<br>CSIL Windows systems Known Issues
CSIL Linux/UNIX FAQ Basic Linux Command Line Survival<br>Known Issues<br>How to kill Unix Processes
Grads & Researchers<br>Guides & Tips Print, Photocopy & Scan
News
SFU prof launches legal-AI collaboration with Caseway to improve access to justice
January 14, 2026
Can making 100 million court decisions searchable improve outcomes for people without lawyers? SFU computing science professor, Angel Chang, and Caseway begin research to find out.
Professor Chang is leading a planned research collaboration with Vancouver-based startup Caseway AI to examine a simple but high-impact question:
If court decisions are made fully searchable and usable by modern AI systems, will self-represented and marginalized people make better legal decisions?
Indexing a 100 million court decisions
The collaboration is being developed as a Mitacs-funded project. While the funding application is yet to be submitted, SFU and Caseway have already begun technical and research work due to the scale of the data and the urgency of access-to-justice challenges. Building and indexing a 100 million court decisions in Canada and the United States is a multi-year effort, and both teams agreed that early progress was critical.
At the center of the research is Caseway’s effort to publish and index more than 100 million Canadian and United States court decisions in a format that is searchable not only by humans, but by large language models such as ChatGPT and other AI systems. Each decision is structured, indexed, and made discoverable through modern search engines, with the goal of becoming a reliable, authoritative source that artificial intelligence systems can reference directly.
Angel Chang, professor in SFU’s School of Computing Science, emphasizes the importance of testing this rigorously:
“This research is not about replacing lawyers or automating legal advice. It’s about asking a careful, evidence-based question: if people without lawyers can access accurate, searchable court decisions through systems that use artificial intelligence, does that change how they understand their options and make early legal decisions? That’s what we want to measure.”
Hallucinations with LLMs
Today, most general-purpose AI tools lack access to real court decisions. As a result, they often rely on secondary sources such as blogs, forums, or summaries, which leads to hallucinations, missing context, and misleading legal information. Caseway’s approach is different: publish the primary source itself. When AI systems surface legal information, they can link back to the official court decision hosted on Caseway, allowing users to verify claims against the original judicial text.
The planned research will evaluate whether this shift in the information environment changes outcomes for people without lawyers. Rather than testing whether AI can give legal advice, the project focuses on whether access to accurate, searchable precedent improves understanding, confidence, and early-stage decision-making. For individuals going through the court system without a lawyer, even small improvements in comprehension of prior cases and legal standards may have meaningful downstream effects.
Retrieval system design and embedding experiments
Under Dr. Chang’s supervision, SFU students are already contributing to early prototyping work, including retrieval system design, embedding experiments, and evaluation of ranking quality. These efforts are...