For 30 Days, We're Doubling Free and Member Access to Our AI Connector
In May, we released a tool called an MCP connector that brings the power of CourtListener to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. We've been in awe of how popular our new MCP tool is, and we want more people to learn about it and give it a spin.
We already make it available to all users for occasional usage, with Free Law Project members getting elevated access. To encourage even more people to try it, for the next 30 days we're doubling how much access everybody gets — members and non-members alike.
The more people that use this tool, the more we achieve our mission of making the law accessible and understandable to all. We hope this promotion shows people what's now possible.
What are MCP connectors all about?
If you're new to MCP connectors, you might wonder what the hype is about. Simply put, MCP is a way for third parties to bring tools and data directly into AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT. For example, an airline could make an MCP. If they did, you could ask Claude to "Book me a flight to NYC tomorrow morning." The MCP would reach into the airline's database of flights and take care of the rest.
For a legal research tool like CourtListener, it allows quite a lot more. Our blog post laid out a few options:
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Legal researchers can pull citation networks across jurisdictions, analyze how legal language has shifted over time, trace the lineage of a doctrine from its origins to today, and visualize it all.
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Lawyers and legal aid organizations can surface relevant dockets and case history without an expensive subscription, search filings, pull opinions, and verify citations inside a single workflow.
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Journalists and policy researchers can investigate judicial behavior patterns, track litigation trends across courts, and dig into public court records without specialized tools.
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Court watchers can subscribe to dozens of cases or search queries and manage case or search alerts right within their AI assistant.
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Developers and legal tech builders can prototype AI-powered legal applications with direct access to structured, primary-source legal data through a standardized interface.
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Self-represented litigants can understand what has been filed in their case, find analogous cases, and get grounded answers to legal questions backed by real primary sources, not generated text.
Here is a sampling of prompts to try:
- "Find recent opinions on qualified immunity and identify circuit splits"
- "Pull the latest filings on [docket number] and explain what is happening"
- "Make me an alert any time Miranda v. Arizona is cited by the Supreme Court"
- "Verify every citation in this brief and flag anything that looks off"
- "Draft a memo on how circuits have treated [legal issue] and cite the leading cases"
- "Find the status of [a given case] and tell me what's next for it"
The best way to understand it is to install it and tell it what to do. Installation only takes a minute, and our wiki can walk you through the process.
Once it's set up, chat with it.
The nitty-gritty
Our MCP tool is powered by the CourtListener APIs, which we make available to all our users. All users get limited API access, and members get elevated access according to their membership tier.
Rates for free users and members except those in the EDU tier are doubled from now through August 6 (EDU members already enjoy elevated access).
The changes can be verified in your CourtListener profile.
