AI Legal Research

Legal Research is the heart of Semantis AI: an AI chat that searches the South African judgment database and answers your questions with cited authority.

Starting a conversation

Open Legal Research from the sidebar. The home page lists your existing research conversations and shows how many you have used against your plan's conversation allowance. Click New conversation to begin.

Asking good questions

Write questions in plain language, with as much context as a well-briefed junior would need: the area of law, the relief or issue, and any constraints (court level, recency). Follow-up questions stay in the same conversation, so the AI keeps your earlier context.

Choosing your AI model

Each conversation lets you pick which AI model answers, from the models included in your plan:

• Paralegal — fast models suited to quick look-ups and summaries.
• Junior Legal Practitioner — adds mid-frontier models (the platform default among them) for more thorough analysis.
• Senior Legal Practitioner — the full ladder, including the most capable frontier models for complex, multi-issue research.

You can also adjust the reasoning effort on supported models — higher effort trades speed for deeper analysis.

Selecting courts to search

By default your question is searched across the judgment database. Use the court selector to narrow the search to particular courts — for example, only the Constitutional Court and Supreme Court of Appeal when you need binding authority.

Deep research

For questions that warrant it, deep research runs a longer, multi-step investigation in the background. You can leave the page and come back — the session is recovered when you refresh.

Doing something with the answer

From any answer you can:

• Export the conversation to Word (DOCX) or PDF;
• Email it to yourself or a colleague;
• Save it to a matter's notes (Senior subscribers with My Desk) so the research lives with the file it belongs to;
• Follow the citations through to the full judgment, where you can read, save, or run single-case research.

Managing conversations

Conversations count against your plan's retention limit. Delete ones you no longer need from the Legal Research home page to make room for new work.