Public, but not accessible

The High Court of Justice of England & Wales publishes its case records. Anyone may search them. In practice that means one case at a time, through a form that asks you to already know what you are looking for, with results you cannot sort, compare, count or keep.

So the information is public in the way a library with no catalogue is public. If you know the shelf, you can have the book. If you want to ask which shelf holds the most books, or which books arrived together, or who keeps borrowing them — you are out of luck. The barrier is not permission. It is friction.

Friction is not neutral. It decides who gets to know things. A firm with a research budget can pay someone to click through a thousand records; a journalist, a small business, an academic or a litigant in person cannot. The record is equally open to all of them and useful to almost none of them.

Folio collects those published records, keeps them current, and gives them the things the original search never had: dates you can sort, parties you can count, firms you can follow, documents you can price, and cross-references you can actually follow.

Nothing here is private, leaked or inferred. Every case, party, representative and docket entry is reproduced as the court published it. What is added is structure — and a way to ask questions in plain English instead of learning a search syntax.

The corpus is built incrementally, so every figure describes what has been collected so far, not everything that exists. Where a count rests on a thin sample, that is worth knowing before quoting it.

Some fields the courts simply do not publish — most cases carry no party address and no claim value — so you will find those absent rather than estimated. Where a value is derived rather than reproduced, such as grouping the several spellings of a firm’s name, it is labelled as derived and the original is kept alongside it.

The Librarian shows its working for the same reason: an answer you cannot check is not much better than no answer. It can still be wrong. Follow the case links.

This is a research aid, not a source of truth and not legal advice. The court record is the record; Folio is a way of finding your way around it. Before relying on anything here, check it against the original.

Court records name real people involved in real disputes, many of them not by choice. They are reproduced here because they were published, not because the people in them are public figures. That deserves more care than a dataset usually gets, and it is why this exists to make the record navigable rather than to make anyone easier to find.