Every case it cites, you can open.
That is a seven word promise, and the only useful thing to do with a promise like that is write down exactly what it commits us to. This page is the long version: what CaseSharp guarantees about every answer, what it refuses to do, and how you can check any of it yourself without taking our word for it.
Four commitments, and all four are checkable from inside the product.
A verification standard that you have to trust is not a standard. Each of these is a behaviour you can test in a minute on the free plan.
Every claim opens a paragraph
Check it in one click
Every citation in every answer is a link into the judgment at the paragraph the claim came from. Not the case, the paragraph. Click it and you are reading the words the answer was built on, so verifying an authority takes about four seconds rather than a separate search.
Sharp will tell you when it does not know
Refusal is a feature
If there is no authority in the corpus to support an answer, Sharp says so and shows you what it did find. It does not produce a citation to fill the gap. The same rule applies to AGLC4: when a reference cannot be parsed, the output is flagged for manual review instead of guessed, because a confident wrong citation is worse than no citation.
Nothing it produces is work you hand in
By design
Sharp answers questions about the law and produces briefs and citations from real judgments. It will not write your problem question answer or your research essay. Every substantive output carries a human-review notice, and you should still read the cases you rely on.
The coverage date is on every page
Corpus current to the end of April 2026
The corpus is 73,000 audited Australian decisions, current to the end of April 2026. Judgments handed down after that date are not in it yet, and rather than hide that, the date sits in the footer of every page and in the answer surface itself. For anything very recent, check AustLII or your library database as well.
Finding the case is the easy half. Seeing what has cited it since is the other one.
Search gives you a list of cases. What it does not give you is the trail of later decisions that have cited each one. Most research tools, including the free ones every Australian law school teaches, were built around search. They are very good at it. What they tell you about a case's later life is usually a single number: this judgment has been cited a lot. That does not tell you which later courts cited it, which of them carry the most weight, or which paragraph they leaned on.
CaseSharp is built around that trail. Open a judgment and you get its citation graph: the cases that cite it and the cases it cites, ranked by influence, each one a click from the judgment, and each citation marked Available or Not verified. It does not label a case as followed or overruled, and it does not tell you a case is still good law. It puts the later cases in front of you, most influential first, so you can read them and decide. This matters most in week 13, when a scaffold you wrote in week 4 has an authority in it that a later court has moved since and you have no idea.
A citation that does not exist is a problem you cannot argue your way out of.
Australian law schools treat undisclosed AI use as academic misconduct, and a finding has to be disclosed to the admissions board when you apply to be admitted. That is a serious thing to risk on a tool that cannot show you where its answers came from. Australian courts and regulators have already dealt with lawyers who filed AI-invented citations, and every law faculty in the country has been telling some version of that story since.
The response to that is not a disclaimer. It is an architecture where the answer cannot get further than the source text it was built from, and where the honest output when there is no support is to say so. That is the whole standard. It is also why the secondary button on the home page invites you to create a free account and query the corpus yourself: the fastest way to trust a claim about a corpus is to go and test it.
The list of things CaseSharp is not is part of the product.
It is not a citator of record, and where an authority sits outside the corpus it will tell you rather than approximate. It does not carry practitioner commentary or authorised reports, which is what your library databases are for and why most students who use CaseSharp keep using those too. It does not write assessments. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading the judgment.
There is a free plan that does not expire and does not ask for a card, with three Sharp questions and one IRAC brief in total, plus full search and reading with pinpoint links. Pro is A$49 a month. Student pricing is on the way, and until it exists on the checkout it is not quoted anywhere on this site as though it does.
Four pieces that go deeper than this page can.
Long read
The graduation cliff
What happens to your research access the week after you finish, why the free alternatives are not equivalent, and what CaseSharp does about it.
Read →
Method
A citation count is not case treatment
Why a bare citation count tells you a case is influential, not what later courts did with it, and how a citation graph makes reading the later cases fast.
Read →
Practical
AGLC4 mistakes that cost marks
The small punctuation, italics and pinpoint conventions that quietly lose marks, from people who have read every rule so you do not have to.
Read →
Reference
Understanding case treatment
Followed, applied, distinguished, overruled. What each one means in Australian practice, and how to read a treatment chain.
Read →