What is legal research? What are the challenges in the field? And how does LawMate address these challenges?

What is legal research?

Legal research is the systematic process of identifying and analyzing case law, statutes, regulations, court decisions, and academic interpretations to answer legal questions, support lawsuits, analyze pleadings, or ensure regulatory compliance. Traditionally, this process has been tedious and required spending time in law libraries to search for precedents and relevant information. In the past twenty years, this process has been done primarily through keyword-based text search systems. These systems have allowed the user to ask a question and retrieve hundreds of case law, most of which are irrelevant to the legal question, but require the user to sift through them and separate the chaff from the chaff.

Now, the process is being done by artificial intelligence (AI). AI simplifies this process by analyzing vast digital data sets, but the goal remains the same: finding authoritative, relevant, and up-to-date legal information that supports decision-making.

The ongoing challenges in legal research

Despite technological advances, legal research faces significant challenges:

Databases are closed or distributed in many places—the databases of case law, regulation, and legislation are not centralized in a publicly accessible location, and certainly not accessible via API—this fact limits access to critical information.

The complexity of the case law and the various connections—even when the data is available, tracking connections between cases is complicated, for example, how a Supreme Court decision from 2025 overturns a precedent from 20 years ago, due to the ramifications of the case law, appeals courts, and analysis of all relevant information.

Court Hierarchies—The judicial hierarchy adds another layer of complexity. Not all sources of information are created equal; a well-reasoned district court decision from two years ago can sometimes be overturned or upheld on appeal in the Supreme Court, sometimes with a short paragraph.

Judicial decisions are not always uniform—majority, minority, and concurrence opinions carry different legal weight, but many technological tools have difficulty distinguishing between them, which can lead to misinterpretation. This distinction is necessary for a lawyer to rely on different opinions.

Legal language—Legal texts are relatively complex for humans and even AI models. Additionally, legal terms that may be clear to a colleague in the office are unclear to models and are sometimes misinterpreted.

Cross-border cases present jurisdictional conflicts—for example, GDPR compliance versus privacy regulations in Israel.

Shared challenges with additional content worlds

The volume of data is enormous—weighty decisions are published every day alongside thousands of procedural decisions lacking legal content.

Hallucinations—AI models can sometimes be invented to satisfy the will of the questioner. Of course, with technological advances in models, along with working with a closed database that is not supported by information on the network, the risk is small, but it still exists.

Language—Much has been written about the quality of models in languages other than English, where the existing text in the world for training models is limited.

How LawMate is revolutionizing legal research

LawMate’s AI-powered legal research platform addresses these challenges head-on. By integrating private databases with open legal databases, it makes these databases accessible while maintaining accuracy.

LawMate's database is extremely rich and includes extensive case law from the last 100 years with daily updates on new rulings. Current, current legislation, extensive and updated regulation by regulators in Israel, and thousands of articles in Hebrew by leading researchers in Israel alongside articles published in international journals on Israeli law.

The product combines algorithms written by the company's researchers and developers alongside a combination of the world's most advanced AI models with adaptation and training for legal language. The product performs multiple cross-validations between models to receive a high-quality and accurate response. The product makes adjustments to languages other than English, such as Hebrew, to receive a quality and improved response almost as good as in English.

Its dynamic case graph maps citations, appeals, reversals across jurisdictions, and displays similar rulings—plus indications of whether a cited case is under appeal. The platform’s engines break down decisions into majority, minority, and concurrence opinions, ranking each by its precedential weight to prevent errors. The court hierarchy engine ensures that binding authorities (e.g., Supreme Court decisions over peace) take precedence.

The product in the coming months will contain inter-jurisdictional tools that will enable parallel comparison of global legislation and case law and allow lawyers to quickly uncover insights and navigate between global legal systems.

In conclusion

Plain language questions help navigate complex issues. By combining natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), graph analytics, time series analysis, and more, LawMate turns noise into clarity, shortening research time from hours to minutes, and equipping lawyers with the tools to act with precision and confidence. In a field where outdated tools and fragmented data have held back innovation, LawMate is redefining legal research—making it faster, better, and future-proof.