OpenCase vs HAQQ

OpenCase is unusually open about its corpus, and that is to its credit. The Sources Portal is a public page listing every dataset behind the product, with row counts and the date each was last refreshed. At the time of checking it showed 88 indexed sources and 7,109,854 rows, with CourtListener supplying more than 4.2 million cases, the Harvard Caselaw Access Project a further 507,370, and the eCFR, GovInfo and the Federal Register covering regulations.

The homepage describes the same foundation: training on Cornell LII datasets of United States statutes and Supreme Court opinions, daily indexes of federal and state opinions and RECAP dockets, and authenticated PDFs from GovInfo. Every one of those is an American source. The country selector on the Sources Portal is set to the United States and the 88 sources are all filed under Federal / National.

A retrieval-grounded research tool earns its keep by answering from primary law rather than from model memory. That is the whole argument for building one, and OpenCase makes it well inside the United States. The consequence is that the value falls away at the corpus boundary, because outside it the same product has nothing to retrieve and is left doing what any general model does.

This is our opinion rather than a claim about their roadmap, and it is the reason we built HAQQ the way we did. A firm in Dubai, Riyadh or Cairo is not served by an American case law index, however good it is. Free zone instruments, regional codes and Arabic-language sources are not edge cases for those firms, they are the daily work. HAQQ covers 200+ countries so that the grounding travels with the lawyer.

OpenCase puts its research where lawyers write. It ships a Microsoft Word add-in, listed on the Microsoft marketplace, that surfaces authorities and extracts citations while you draft, and it lists connectors for Google Docs, Outlook, Clio, Google Drive and Dropbox. It has also grown calendaring, case monitoring and time tracking around the research core, so it is no longer only a search box.

HAQQ approaches the same problem from the other end. Rather than adding practice tools to a research engine, it runs drafting, contract review, research, practice management and billing as one platform, with an on-premise deployment for firms whose data cannot leave their building. Which shape fits better depends on whether research is the job or one part of it.