Legal Search Engine: Legislation, case law, papers, legal ressources

Help

This help page will provide you with a few useful instructions. You can search on openlaws in exactly the same way as on Google. The difference is that the query will only cover legal websites. You can narrow down the search results even more, if you select one of the predefined categories (Government, Lawyers, Academia, Journals, LegalTech, PDF documents).

You can also use search operators. The same search operators as on Google are supported. Commonly used operators are:

  • “” Useful if you want to search for a specific expression (example: “Black Friday”); Remember: The openlaws search will automatically focus on the “Black Friday” in a legal context. It will not guide to the next sales promotion (like it or not). But you can always continue with the “standard” Google search at the bottom of the search results. You will see the difference in the results.
  • AND This is the standard setting anyways – but you can combine it with other operators to build more sophisticated search queries (example: construction AND contract)
  • OR This will find results with the one search term or with the other – but could also include both (example: “liquidated damages” OR “contractual penalties”)
  • filetype: This can help if you search for a specific filetype, for example a Word document (example: contract template filetype:doc)
  • site: With this operator you can limit your search to a domain, for example Austria (example: e-commerce site:at)
  • define: Useful if you look for definitions (example: define:NDA)
  • after:YYYY-MM-DD Great if you want only the search results after a specific date (example: COVID after:2020-11-21)
  • AROUND(x) Quite advanced, but powerful. Use it if two terms should be close to each other, whereas x refers to the maximum words between your two search terms (example: professor AROUND(5) “legal tech”)

You can find a more comprehensive search operator list on the web, for example on ahrefs.com.

Final words: Please remember, this is a private website. I run this project in my spare time. I am grateful if you suggest legal domains that should be added. I will also take down domains if they are outdated or if they become irrelevant for the legal domain. It may take some time until I can include or exclude a domain. Please provide constructive criticism only. I will not reply to rude messages.