About BabelCite
A search platform for Hong Kong case law, built for lawyers and researchers who need to find the right authority quickly.
The examples below follow one real judgment, CACV 177/2017, through each step.
Kept current
New judgments are added as they're published
The Hong Kong Judiciary publishes new judgments on an ongoing basis. We pull in each new batch, parse it, and add it to the database. The date shown here is the most recent judgment currently in our index.
Recent feature updatesData extraction
What "indexed" actually means
Each judgment arrives as a document, not a database record. We parse the text and extract the case number, parties, court, and date, then store that alongside the full judgment. That is what lets a search match a party name or a provision instantly, instead of scanning documents one at a time.
Judgment as published
CACV 177/2017
[2018] HKCA 210
IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE HKSAR
COURT OF APPEAL
BETWEEN CHOY PO CHUN (蔡寶珍) 1st Plaintiff
and AU WING LUN (區穎麟) Defendant
Date of Judgment: 20 April 2018
Stored record
- Case no.
- CACV 177/2017
- Citation
- [2018] HKCA 210
- Court
- Court of Appeal
- Parties
- Choy Po Chun and Another v. Au Wing Lun
- Judgment
- 20 Apr 2018
168,827 judgments in the index
Citation graph
Mapping how cases cite each other
While parsing a judgment, we also scan its text for references to other cases and legislation, and match each one to the case it refers to. That match is stored as a link between the two cases in both directions, so we know what a case relies on and what later cases have relied on it for.
CACV 177/2017, paragraph 47
He quoted the observation of Cheung JA in Choy Po Chun v Au Wing Lun [2012] 2 HKLRD 148 at §35: “Even if, on the face of the evidence, it is shown that the deceased had dementia, the crux of the matter must be about the severity of his dementia…”
365,036 citation links mapped
Quick triage
Structured case summaries
For cases that are looked up or flagged for review, we run the full judgment through a language model that extracts the legal issues in dispute, the key facts, and the outcome, and store the result as a structured summary. That is enough to judge whether a case is worth reviewing in full, without reading the judgment first. More cases are added to this every day.
Relevance ranking
How search finds the right case
When you search, we compare your query against each case's summary, where one exists, and its full judgment text. Each candidate is scored on how closely it matches the wording of your query and how closely it matches the underlying meaning, and the highest-scoring cases are returned first.
Top 3 results in AI mode, captured 22 Oct 2026
Coming soon
BabelCite for your AI assistant
Your assistant searches and reads the judgments itself, and cites the paragraph it relied on.
Coverage