Field guide
How CourtWatch finds precedents for your case on its own
Verified against the live portal — 23 Jul 2026Open a tracked district or High Court case and the Similar Precedents panel is already populated — judgments from the corpus that share your case's facts, sections or legal points. Each one is marked Binding or Persuasive relative to your case's court, shows the sections it matches, how often it is cited, and links to the court's PDF where one was published. No search, no extra cost — the research meets the case where it sits.
Precedent search answers the question you ask. The Similar Precedents panel answers the one you didn't: it sits on the case page itself, already holding judgments with similar facts, parties or legal points — drawn from the same corpus, matched to your case, with no search typed.
What the panel shows
Each precedent row carries the case title, a snippet of the relevant passage, the citation, the decision date, and chips for the sections it matches with your case — the fastest signal of why it appeared. A Cited by N count shows how often the judgment is relied on within the corpus, and where the court published a PDF, the link is right there. If a listed judgment happens to be a case you track, the row links to your own case page for it.
Binding or Persuasive — the badge that does the sorting
Every row is marked relative to your case's court: a Supreme Court judgment, or one from your own High Court's line of authority, carries Binding; a judgment from another High Court carries Persuasive. The panel does the jurisdictional sorting a junior would otherwise do with a digest open.
Where it appears
On district court and High Court case pages, for any signed-in account — no plan gate, no credit. The panel states its own provenance: sourced from public Supreme Court and High Court records.
FAQ
Do I have to run a search for similar precedents to appear?
No. The panel populates on the case page by itself, matched from the case's facts, parties and cited sections. Precedent Search remains there for the questions you want to phrase yourself.
What do Binding and Persuasive mean on a precedent?
Binding means the judgment comes from a court whose decisions bind the court hearing your case — the Supreme Court, or your case's own High Court. Persuasive means it comes from a coordinate court whose reasoning may be adopted but does not bind. The badge is computed relative to your case's court.
Does the similar-precedents panel cost anything?
No. It appears for every signed-in account on district and High Court case pages, without spending searches, credits or briefs.
Open a case you track and read what the corpus already found.
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