Take a famous example. Donoghue v Stevenson is one of the most cited authorities in the common law. A citation count will tell you that much, and it is genuinely useful: a case relied on by a great many later courts is a case you cannot ignore. But the count is a measure of influence, not of what each later court did with the case. It does not tell you which of those later decisions adopted Lord Atkin’s neighbour principle, which applied it in a narrower form, and which distinguished the case on its facts.
Those are different stories, and no single label captures them. “Followed”, “applied”, “distinguished” and “overruled” are real and important concepts in Australian practice, but working out which one applies to the paragraph you intend to rely on is a reading task. It means opening the later judgments and seeing what they did. A tool can make that task faster. It should not pretend to have done it for you.
Why the reading matters.
If you are running a negligence argument and your opponent is going to rely on Donoghue, the question is rarely whether Donoghue is good law. The question is whether the reasoning you intend to lean on is the reasoning that has held up, or the reasoning a line of later cases has quietly confined. That confinement lives in the text of the later judgments. You find it by reading them, in order of how much they matter.
The same is true in an exam scaffold. A scaffold built in week 4 is a liability by week 13 if a later court has moved the law since, and the way you catch that is to look at the cases that have cited each authority on the sheet. What slows this down is not the reading itself. It is finding the right later cases, and knowing which of them to open first.
What CaseSharp actually gives you.
Open a case in CaseSharp and you get its citation graph. It has two directions. “Cited by” is the list of cases that rely on this authority. “Cites” is the list of authorities this case relies on. Both are ranked by influence, which is each related case’s own cited-by count, so the most-relied-on cases sit at the top under labels that run from Landmark authority down to Cited occasionally.
Influence is a citation count, not a verdict. A case can be heavily cited and still be a case a later court has narrowed, so the ranking never uses the language of good or bad law. What it does is answer a narrower and honest question: of the cases citing this one, which ones are worth opening first. Every related case is a click away from the judgment itself, and each citation carries a plain status, Available when the endpoint resolves to a record you can open, or Not verified when it does not.
What it deliberately does not do.
CaseSharp does not classify the relationship for you. It does not put a badge on Donoghue that reads “followed”, it does not tell you a case is still good law, and it does not monitor authorities for treatment changes. Deciding whether a later case followed, applied or distinguished the paragraph you care about is the reading you do, and it stays with you.
That boundary is deliberate. A confident label the tool cannot stand behind is worse than no label, because it invites you to skip the reading that the label was standing in for. Where an authority sits outside the corpus, CaseSharp says so rather than approximate. The citation graph puts the later cases in front of you, in a sensible order, with the judgment one click away. The judgment about what they mean is yours to make, which in a legal argument is where it has to sit anyway.
Sources.
Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562.
Australian Guide to Legal Citation, 4th edition, rules on pinpoint paragraph references.