A legal research database is an online library of statutes, court judgments and expert commentary, in which each document is summarised and linked to the others. Lawyers search it to find what the law says and how courts have applied it. It is also called a legal research service or a case law database. Law firms, companies' legal teams, courts and law schools pay for it by yearly subscription. In India, the best-known databases include SCC Online and Manupatra, alongside the international legal publishers.
Indian courts publish their judgments on their own websites, for free. So why do lawyers pay? Because a raw judgment is hard to use. A Supreme Court judgment can run to 200 pages. The publisher's editors add a headnote at the top: a short summary of the legal points that the court decided. They tag each judgment with the sections of the statutes that it discusses. They link every earlier case that the judgment cites, and every later case that cites it. They also keep each statute up to date with its amendments, so that a lawyer can read a section as it stood on any date. This work of collecting, cleaning and linking public data, and selling the result, is described in data as a service.
Take, for example, an advocate in Kolkata who represents a supplier. The supplier's customer paid by cheque, and the cheque bounced. Under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, a bounced cheque can be a criminal offence, if the supplier follows a set procedure of notices and deadlines. The advocate searches the database for "Section 138" and "notice", filtered to Supreme Court judgments since 2015. About 60 judgments match. She reads the 60 headnotes, not 60 full judgments. She opens the four judgments that look closest to her client's facts. For each one, the database's citator shows whether later courts have followed it or overruled it. She saves the four judgments, with her notes, to her firm's legal document management system.
The database has become more important since AI arrived. A legal AI assistant can answer a legal question in plain English. But an AI model can also invent a case that does not exist, a problem called AI hallucination. The safer assistants first search a real legal database, and then answer only from the judgments they find there.
How is it different from an online lawyer directory? A directory explains common legal problems in plain language for ordinary people, and lists lawyers to call. A research database holds the full statutes and judgments, and it is built for lawyers, judges and law students.