What students said on Reddit
A student on r/uklaw wanted cases that apply the provisions they were writing about in an exam, and asked whether AI could find them. They would summarise the cases themselves. The answer was yes, carefully, and the replies explain what carefully means. This page is LexCases summarising a public Reddit discussion in our own words. It is not Reddit, no username appears here, and the students in the thread do not speak for us.
Built by a law student, with the students who use it.
On this page
A short thread, and a useful one. We read the question and every reply the page showed. One comment had been deleted by its author; one nested reply was folded away. Neither is included.
Can you use AI to help find relevant case law?, on r/uklaw, posted 19 April 2026.
Every reply that gave advice said the same thing: use it if you like, then check it.
The first reply said yes, but check that the case exists and that it is actually relevant to what you are researching. Lawyers, they pointed out, have been embarrassed in court citing cases an AI made up.
Another reply added that a barrister had recently been caught doing it in the High Court.
One student had tried Copilot for exactly this. It gave four cases: one of limited relevance, and three with the wrong citations, one of them twenty years out. Corrected, it apologised and gave a new citation, which was also wrong.
One reply pushed back on a comment that has since been deleted, comparing it to people who once refused to research online and insisted on the printed law reports. Using a tool is fine. Skipping the check is not.
One student who had been burned laid out three checks. The checks are theirs, in their order; the notes under each are ours.
Not a summary of it and not the AI's description of it. The judgment itself, for every case you mean to cite.
Make sure the party names and the citation are right. In the student's test, three of four citations were wrong.
Read enough of the judgment to confirm it supports the point the AI attached it to.
The students in this thread said yes, as a starting point, as long as you then check that each case exists, that it is relevant, and that it says what you need it to say.
One student tried it and got four cases back: one of limited relevance and three with the wrong citations. When corrected, the tool apologised and offered another citation that was also wrong.
Find the actual judgment, check the party names and the citation are correct, and read enough of it to confirm it says what the AI claimed.
We build LexCases, which does the first half of what this student asked for: describe the problem in plain English and it returns cases, each put through a separate check, with anything that cannot be confirmed dropped. That check is itself an AI process, so the three steps above still apply to every case it gives you.