Docs / Getting started / Overview
How CaseWise works.
Four rooms over one library. Chat answers questions, Research finds authority, Referencing checks citations, Documents carries the draft out the door - and every one of them works from the same set of sources, so a case you found in one room is already there in the next.
Fig. 1 · The four surfaces, one library
A word on how these docs are written: they describe what the product does today. Where a capability is not finished, the page says so plainly instead of describing the plan - the same rule the product itself follows when it cannot verify a source.
Product mockup — not a recording of live output.
Signing in
Students
Sign in with an email address. Your first session opens with a short setup - jurisdiction and course level - so answers arrive scoped to where you study.
Practitioners
Sign in with an email address. Role routes answers, not access. Supported use is education, general legal research and primary-source discovery.
Group members
Seats are issued by your administrator, by domain or by list.
Chat
Ask in plain language and get an answer with its sources attached. Chat is the front door: it routes your question to the right depth, and it tells you which parts of its answer rest on verified sources and which are general knowledge.
Ask a citation question
How a source is cited, which form applies, and why a correction was made - answered with the rule named, not just the fix.
Find authority
Ask for cases or legislation on a point. Sources arrive attached and badged, and each one links through to its own page.
Grounded, or general - and labelled
When an answer rests on retrieved sources, they are listed with it. When part of an answer is general legal knowledge rather than a verified source, it is labelled as exactly that - the two are never blended silently.
Send to the editor
Ask for a memo, a case note or a problem answer and the draft opens in Documents with its footnotes already in place - no retyping, no losing the sources on the way.
Watch it work
Long answers show their stages by name while they run - searching, reading, verifying, writing - rather than a spinner. If a stage fails or retries, the panel says so. Honest progress is the product's habit, not a loading animation.
Research
A search engine for decided Australian cases and legislation. Not a summariser of the internet: results come from the corpus and from official records, and every one carries the link to where it lives.
Search
A case name, a citation, an Act and section, or a plain-words description of the legal problem. While a search runs, the strip names what it is doing - and when held results arrive before the live search finishes, it says that too.
Filter
Court, year and jurisdiction, applied after the first result set - narrow when you can see what came back, not before.
The case page
Every case opens to its own page: what was decided, the court and date, the citation in AGLC4 form ready to use, and the judgment text to read in place.
Open the record
Every result links out to the official source it came from. Provenance is the point: you can always see where a case or a provision actually lives, and check it there yourself.
Referencing
Check footnotes you have written, or hand over prose and have them built. Every citation is hunted down against the record before anything is said about it - and what cannot be found is refused, never invented.
Fig. 2 · The check, end to end
Check a draft
Paste the essay or memo. Each footnote is read in turn and faults are named with the rule they break. If a footnote cannot be read at all, the panel says so and lists it by number - a count like 15 of 20 footnotes read is shown rather than a silent skip.
Create footnotes
Give it prose and it finds the authority, verifies it, then writes the note in AGLC4 form. Given a bare source list instead of prose, it says what it needs rather than guessing.
Read the rule
Every fault cites the AGLC4 rule it breaks, so the fix is a decision you can defend in a marking rubric, not a change you take on faith.
Accepting is safe
Every applied change announces itself - what is announced is what was applied, nothing is fixed silently. Accepting a correction can never make a footnote worse, and after any change the connected references - Ibid and above n - are rebuilt so the chain stays true.
What cannot be found is refused
A source that cannot be located gets no citation. The card shows what was searched - title, author, journal - states that no record was found, and offers no Accept. A real source that simply cannot be verified online keeps its formatting help, under an honest not-verified label. The two states are different, and the product keeps them different.
This source could not be found, so no citation is written for it.
Fig. 3 · The refusal, illustrated - the real card is a live capture, pending
Documents
A real editor for memos, case notes and problem answers - with real footnotes and real pages, so what you see while writing is what leaves in the file.
Study memo — educational draft only
CaseWise is an educational study tool, not a law firm or legal service. This output is not legal advice and may be incomplete, inaccurate or out of date. Do not rely on it for a real person, client, dispute, deadline or court matter. Verify all authorities against primary sources and seek advice from a qualified lawyer.
Draft
Write with the sources beside you rather than in another tab. Drafts started in Chat open here with their footnotes carried across.
Insert authority
Drop a case in at any point and the numbering reflows - including the subsequent references that depend on it.
Real pages
The editor lays your work out as true pages - page breaks where they will actually fall, footnotes at the foot of the page they belong to. No surprise reflow at export time.
Check citations in place
The same checker that powers Referencing runs inside the editor, so a document can be reviewed where it is written - same verdicts, same rules, same band.
The verification band
One strip above every checked document carries the whole state of the check. Its words are deliberate, and two of them are deliberately different: corrected is what the checker computed, accepted is what you applied. They are never merged.
Fig. 4 · The band, word by word - counts shown are an example
Why two different words
A checker that reports its own fixes as your acceptances is grading its own homework. Keeping the counts separate means the band always tells you how much of the document's state is machine-checked and how much is your judgement, exercised.
The three verdicts
VERIFIED - found and matched against the record. NOT VERIFIED - a real source that has no public register to confirm it; its formatting help stays, honestly labelled. REFUSED - no record found at all; no citation is written.
Nothing is fixed silently
Every applied change has its own card. What is announced equals what was applied - so the band's counts, the cards on screen, and the document's bytes always agree.
AGLC4 rules covered
A numbered proceeding takes square brackets, and a pinpoint follows a comma without “at”. Every correction reads like this: the fault, the fix, and the rule that decides it.
Fig. 5 · A correction, named by its rule
Cases
Reported and unreported form, party names and their italics, year brackets, volume and page, pinpoints, and the court identifier.
Legislation
Short title, jurisdiction, section and subsection form, and current versus repealed provisions.
Subsequent references
Ibid, above n, and short-form case names - the faults we see most often, and the ones that break in chains when an edit moves a footnote. The chain is rebuilt after every change.
Secondary sources
Books, journal articles, reports and online material, including pinpoint form.
Exports
Word
Footnotes leave as real Word footnotes - not endnote lookalikes - and hold their numbering when the file is reopened. Case-name italics survive into the file itself. This is the export we test hardest, because it is the one that gets submitted.
The file matches the page
Because the editor works in real pages, the exported document is the document you were looking at - same breaks, same footnote placement. Export is not a conversion step that can surprise you.
Submission copies
The Word file opens cleanly in Word and Google Docs, and prints to PDF from either - footnotes rendered in place - for portals that only take a flat file.
Limits
The product's habit of saying what it cannot do extends to its own docs. These are the edges, plainly.
Jurisdiction
Australian case law and legislation. Other jurisdictions are not covered. Coverage runs deeper in some Australian jurisdictions than others and is expanding - every result names the source it came from, so you can always see what you are standing on.
Referencing style
AGLC4 only. Other styles are not supported at launch.
Time
Careful work takes real time. A full research pass or a first draft runs for a while, and the product shows you its stages by name rather than pretending to be instant. Nothing on this site claims a speed the product does not have.
Judgement
It reports what it verified. Deciding whether an authority is on point - whether it helps your argument - is your work, and the product is built to make that judgement easier to exercise, not to exercise it for you.
What must not go in
Do not upload client information, privileged, confidential or court-restricted material, or personal information about another person.