Terms of Service

DRAFT. The owner must complete and review this before launch. Layout to follow the owner's lexie template; a Singapore lawyer reviews before launch.

1. Introduction

TODO: Owner name and legal entity details.
Open Court provides primary law API access for AI and computational legal research.

You may use Open Court to research the law and to build products that answer your own users' legal questions.

Without a written partner agreement, you may not:

copy or store Open Court's results in bulk, or build a database, index or dataset from them;
use Open Court's results to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine-learning model, or to build a legal search or retrieval service;
share an API key outside your organisation, or open more than one account to get around a limit;
get around rate limits, daily limits, spend caps or any other technical control;
send requests intended to degrade the service.

We keep usage metadata for each API key: endpoint, response status, response time, and daily totals such as the number of calls and an estimate of how many distinct documents were returned. We do not keep your queries or drafts. See the Privacy Policy.
We use these totals to detect use that breaches section 2. A person reviews every case before we act.
Each plan has a per-minute rate limit and may have a daily call limit. Bulk change feeds are only available on partner plans.
If we reasonably believe an account is breaching section 2, we may, after that review and without notice: lower its limits; suspend or close it; or change the results we send it. Changed results may be in a different order, may come from different documents or from other parts of the same document, and may include records, with invented text, that are not real judgments and that identify the API key they were sent to.
Fees for calls made while these measures apply remain payable.
/v1/verify always checks citations honestly, for every account. It never reports a record that is not a real judgment as verified. We never change the words of a real judgment or of legislation, and every real passage is shown with its own citation.
The status check (/v1/status) is free and limited to once a minute and five times a day per account.
Accounts flagged for review are monitored more closely for 30 days (totals only, as described in the Privacy Policy).

Open Court is an information service, not a law firm.
Content is provided "as is" without warranty. Users should verify official government publications.