Legal Skill · Free
BAILII Case Law Search
Search UK case law. Read the actual judgments.
Requires a local BAILII MCP server (BAILII blocks cloud IPs)
A Claude skill that searches BAILII for UK case law and retrieves full judgment text. Finds how courts have ruled on a topic, extracts key principles, weighs results by court hierarchy, and cites properly.
The problem
Legal research means searching BAILII manually, clicking through results, reading 50-page judgments to find the one paragraph that matters, and working out which court level makes it binding. A thorough case law search takes hours. Most people stop at the first result.
What it does
Features
- Searches BAILII across all UK courts: UKSC, EWCA, EWHC, Upper Tribunal, EAT
- Weights results by court hierarchy: a Supreme Court decision outweighs ten tribunal cases
- Retrieves full judgment text and extracts the ratio decidendi in 1-2 sentences
- Filters by court level and recency to find the strongest authority
- Provides neutral citations in correct format with BAILII URLs
- Distinguishes binding authority from persuasive authority
- States clearly what it cannot do: only covers cases on BAILII, not all reported cases
Getting started
Quick start
- 1
Download the skill and drop it into your project
- 2
Set up the BAILII MCP server locally (instructions included)
- 3
Ask Claude to find case law on any UK legal topic
Free download
What's included
- SKILL.md file for Claude Code, Cursor, or any AI agent
- Setup guide for running the BAILII MCP server locally
- Court hierarchy reference
- Lifetime updates
Who it's for: Solicitors, barristers, paralegals, law students, legal researchers