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03 / Legal research library

Stacks Legal

A private research library: case law, statutes, and regulations in one place, every citation linked, and a citator built from the decisions themselves.

Client
Lofted Technologies product, in use at a New York law firm
Role
Product, design, and engineering
Year
2026
Status
Live · private
Live
Private deployment
Stacks Legal · 34 N.Y.2d 222
Court of Appeals of New York · Decided May 15, 1974
Matter of Pell v Board of Education.
34 N.Y.2d 222 · 1974
CitatorNot Shepard’s
5,202
citing decisions · no negative treatment found
Ct. of Appeals247
App. Div./Term2,824
Trial & other2,113
Federal18
Matter of Hillside Place, LLC v Housing & Community Renewal2d Dept · Sep 16, 2026 · at 230–231
Matter of 382 8th Ave. Realty Corp. v DHCR1st Dept · Aug 13, 2026 · at 231
Matter of Mantilla v NYC Dept. of Hous. Preserv. & Dev.Ct App · Dec 18, 2025 · at 231
Citator graph of Sept. 24, 2026
5M+decisions behind one search box
40M+citation links, shown beside each decision
25+library tools for the AI research assistant
Everyassistant quotation checked against the source text

The brief

Why it needed to exist.

Commercial research platforms are expensive, and the free sources lack a citator that tracks treatment. The firm needed one place to read, search, and trace authority.

The production

What we built.

Stacks Legal puts New York and federal case law, statutes, and regulations behind one search box. Every decision gets a permanent page where each citation inside it is a live link, and a citator panel beside it shows who cited the case, how, and what happened on appeal.

An AI research assistant works the same library under hard budgets, and every quotation it offers is checked against the stored text and linked to the passage it came from.

  1. 01One box, many sources

    Full-text search across decisions, statutes, the U.S. Code, the CFR, the Federal Register, agency opinions, and licensed practice treatises, with intent detection and filters.

  2. 02A page for every decision

    Each citation in the text is linked, and a citator panel lists citing references, negative treatment, and direct history.

  3. 03Browse like a library

    Tables of contents for the U.S. Code and the CFR, reporters by volume, federal courts by year, New York slip decisions by month, treatises, and a verdicts browser.

  4. 04An assistant that cites

    Claude works the library's own tools under per-question budgets and a daily cost cap. Quotations are checked against the source text before they're shown.

  5. 05Research that travels

    History, folders, and an installable offline app. Save a folder before court and read it without a connection.

  6. 06Private by default

    Sign-in restricted to the organization, strict security headers, and nothing indexed publicly.

Under the hood

How it’s made.

  • Front endReact 19, TypeScript, and Vite; sanitized Markdown rendering
  • Back endPython service reading the Stacks Legal MCP's collections read-only
  • AIClaude with 25+ library tools, streamed responses, and verified quotations

Stack: Python · React 19 · Vite · SQLite full-text search · Claude · PWA

Stills

From the set.

Stacks sign-in page listing the kinds of law it holds. The organization's name is redacted.
The sign-in page. The organization's name is redacted.
Stacks sign-in page on a phone, with the organization's name redacted
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