AccuFind adds case law to its Australian legal corpus

AccuFind has added case law to its corpus of primary legal sources. The corpus now holds the full text of judgments from Australian courts and tribunals that publish them online.

It spans 733,876 judgments from 67 distinct courts and tribunals. Alongside them are the consolidated legislation of all 10 jurisdictions in Australia and New Zealand and the complete ATO Legal Database. Case law search is live for every state, territory, federal court and specialist tribunal.

What you can now search

The case law index covers the whole Australian court hierarchy. It also covers the major specialist tribunals, where most government and frontline practitioners work:

• High Court and federal courts: the High Court of Australia (from 1903), the Federal Court of Australia (57,152 decisions) and its Full Court, and the Federal Circuit and Family Court (Divisions 1 and 2, first instance and appeals)
• State and territory superior courts: the Supreme Courts and Courts of Appeal of NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory
• District and County Courts: the NSW District Court, the Victorian County Court, and the District Courts of Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia
• Specialist tribunals: the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (76,862 decisions, from 1962), Fair Work Commission (31,365), Fair Work Australia, Australian Industrial Relations Commission (30,882), Migration Review Tribunal (51,822), Refugee Review Tribunal (35,051) and National Native Title Tribunal
• State civil and administrative tribunals: the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT, 53,240), QCAT, ACAT, NCAT, NTCAT, TASCAT, SACAT and WA SAT
• Coroners and specialist courts: the coroners' courts of every state and territory, the Queensland Land Court, Planning and Environment Court, Mental Health Court and Children's Court, and the South Australian Employment Tribunal.

Why specialist tribunal coverage matters

Commercial legal databases have tended to put the authorised law reports of superior courts first. Yet in family violence, migration, industrial relations, child protection and regulatory compliance, tribunals make most of the relevant decisions. Coverage of tribunals outside the authorised reports is usually thinner.

AccuFind indexes every Australian court and tribunal that publishes judgments online, in full, without choosing what to include. A migration agent gets the same depth on Migration Review Tribunal decisions as a barrister gets on the High Court. A workplace lawyer gets full Fair Work Commission coverage going back to 1985.

Searched with legislation and ATO guidance

Case law sits alongside the material already in the corpus:

• 56,749 consolidated Acts, regulations and statutory rules from the Federal Register of Legislation, all 8 Australian state and territory publishers, and New Zealand
• the full ATO Legal Database: Taxation Rulings, Determinations, Class Rulings, Product Rulings, GST Rulings, FBT Rulings, Law Companion Rulings, Practice Statements, Decision Impact Statements, and the historical Income Tax Rulings series (1951 to 1992).

Every query searches all three sources at once. A frontline officer who asks about a use-of-force scenario gets the Police Powers and Responsibilities Act and the Crimes Act sections that apply. They also get the case law that interprets both and any departmental Practice Statement, in one answer with citations to the paragraph.

What this means in practice

The larger corpus is live in every AccuFind deployment. It needs no new configuration, and existing customers see the wider index in their next query.

For new customers, AccuFind now covers the judgments of superior courts and the unreported decisions of every state and federal court. It also covers the full text of every Act and regulation, ATO guidance and the decisions of specialist tribunals. You can search all of it in one place, with a citation to the paragraph in every answer.

Get in touch

For partnership enquiries, or a demonstration of the wider corpus across case law, legislation and ATO guidance, email contact@accufind.ai.