Country: Ireland
Category: Legal
Project aim: Our aim is to create a digital platform for legal research, such as that which is currently carried out by practicing lawyers. Crucially however, we also aim to facilitate the leverage of legal information outside of pure legal practice. Legal decisions drive financial outcomes, and with the right framework in place, we see proper access to law having deep implications for a diverse range of industries.
What does Courtsdesk do?
In the majority of jurisdictions, only a tiny portion of possible legal information is made available. In the UK, for example, the top two suppliers in legal data publish just 2% of cases. These are precedent cases; provided primarily for their use in legal argument.
At Courtsdesk, we consider litigation society’s last untapped dataset, and we see huge value in the information discarded by conventional providers. Our objective is to provide 100% of cases in any jurisdiction in which we’re active; information which we publish live, digitally, in conjunction with relevant corporate and financial datasets. The result is a comprehensive, multifaceted resource with use cases throughout a broad spectrum of industries.
One consequence of this approach is that Courtsdesk represents a commercial path to alleviating the information deficit which currently accompanies and inhibits intra-EU cross border trade. Whilst harmonisation has brought substantive consistency amongst domestic member state regulation, inter EU Member State traders must still contend with eleven currencies, twenty-four languages, 510 million individuals, 26 million businesses, and 28 legal systems; each with its own problematic datasets of varying availability. The lack of legal and commercial certainty which results represents a silent, but serious impediment to the efficiency of the Single Market. Our service aims to imp
rove access to, and understanding of, justice systems and commercial entities across the single market, correlatively increasing the efficiency of intra-EU cross border trade.
How did Courtsdesk come about?
Courtsdesk was conceived as a result of our CEO’s time editing national newspapers in the UK and Ireland. Investigative journalism is a lot like corporate due diligence; good business investigations rely on factual, timely legal and financial data. Our CEO’s experience investigating business entities revealed to him how needlessly difficult fact finding was with existing tools, and how access to information could be drastically enhanced through technical innovation.
Which does the future hold?
We launched in Ireland in 2017 and have already provided our users with access to tens of thousands of cases which had never been previously available. Internationally we are adjusting focus to European expansion, and look forward to working with agencies and businesses across Europe and the world.courtsdesk-logo-dark (1)courtsdesk-logo-dark (1)
Being nominated for legal category at the StartUp Europe Awards is a proud moment for our team as it validates our mission. We are building the first trans-European network of domestic courts data via a live streaming data platform.