Courtsdesk

Courtsdesk, which trades its offering under the banner Courts Data Solutions, sources, standardises and distributes public court data from multiple jurisdictions, principally Ireland and the UK. Its stated mission is to digitise public courts data to improve court reporting and media access to justice information, support public-interest research and policy reform, and curate data that helps prevent fraud, financial crime and terror financing. The company notes that in the UK and Ireland there is no digital archive or search covering 98 per cent of court cases, and positions itself and its partners as collating that information for news outlets, public bodies, legal services and financial risk managers.

Products include SaaS platforms aimed at business users, on-demand search, courts coverage, API integration for client workflows, live data feeds from criminal and civil courts for researchers, and reports, analytics and investigations consulting. Named sectors served are news and media, legal services, public sector, investigations, insurance, insolvency, emergency services, financial services (AML, KYB and KYC use cases) and HR/recruitment. The platform allows searching, tracking and relationship mapping of entities and events across the legal system — people, companies, judges and law firms — and is oriented to protagonist search rather than legal precedent.

The company describes building the first digital search and tracking system for the lower courts in Ireland and subsequently partnering with HM Courts and Tribunals Service to build a first digital portal for the Magistrates' Courts of the UK.

Founding story

Founder Enda Leahy, a former journalist and editor at The Sunday Times and The Mail on Sunday, found obtaining access to court records to be extremely difficult in practice and built the company to make court access a modern digital research tool; he was joined by CTO and co-founder Alan Larkin, a software engineer with a background in API design, MySQL and statistical analysis.

Business model

Courtsdesk supplies court data through subscription SaaS platforms and tailored data integrations for commercial use, alongside reports, analytics and investigations consulting. Pricing was described at launch as combining per-user annual charges for parts of the service with packages charged on the basis of data downloaded.

Subscription access to SaaS platforms plus data licensing/API integrations and consulting for reports, analytics and investigations.

Traction

By 2017 the company had signed two of the top four Irish law firms and four national newspapers; Irish clients later cited include An Post, Deloitte and Grant Thornton. Trials of the UK magistrates' court service began with Newsquest and Reach PLC, which together publish more than 400 titles and employ over 3,000 journalists, with the BBC and UK national newspapers in talks. Later reporting described the UK platform as having been used by more than 1,500 journalists from 39 media groups.

Latest developments

Reporting cited by WealthBriefing states the UK government deleted/suspended the Courtsdesk court reporting database — described as the UK's largest, used by more than 1,500 journalists from 39 media groups — over a data protection issue. The Minister for Courts and Legal Services, Sarah Sackman, was quoted in the House of Commons saying Courtsdesk had breached the 2020 agreement with the Courts and Tribunals Service by sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, and that Courtsdesk had yet to delete the information it holds. Compliance commentators, including Ripjar CEO Matt Mills, argued the deletion order would weaken adverse-media screening used in anti-money laundering processes. The UK government said it was working on a new arrangement to help journalists report on magistrates' courts.