Terms of Use

These terms govern your use of Lex.NY. By accessing the site or its APIs, you agree to them. If you don’t agree, don’t use the service.

1. What Lex.NY is

Lex.NY is a research engine for New York law. It indexes public records (opinions from CourtListener and the New York Senate OpenLegislation API, statute text from the New York Consolidated Laws) and produces summaries with mandatory citations to those sources. It is supervised by Derek Soltis, a New York-licensed attorney (SDNY/EDNY).

2. Not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship.

Lex.NY is a research tool, not legal advice. Using the site does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and Derek Soltis, Nota.Lawyer, or any other person or entity affiliated with this project. Nothing on Lex.NY constitutes legal counsel for your specific situation.

If you face an actual legal matter, you should engage a qualified attorney who can review the facts, verify the law as currently in force, and advise you in confidence. Lex.NY may surface a relevant case or statute, but it cannot replace the judgment of counsel.

3. Verify everything

Lex.NY is designed to produce citations to real sources. The links it returns go to CourtListener, the New York Senate OpenLegislation site, and other primary publishers. You are responsible for clicking through, reading the source, and confirming that the cited authority says what Lex.NY claims it says. AI summarization can err, even with citation anchoring. Do not rely on a Lex.NY summary without checking the underlying source.

4. Currency

The Lex.NY corpus is updated periodically from bulk dumps published by the Free Law Project (CourtListener) and the New York State Senate. No system is instantaneous, and new decisions and statutory amendments may not yet be reflected. Treat anything time-sensitive as a starting point for further verification, not the final word.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

Use Lex.NY to draft or submit legal filings without independent attorney review.
Attempt to circumvent rate limits, scrape the API at industrial scale, or extract the underlying corpus in bulk.
Use Lex.NY for unlawful purposes or in violation of applicable rules of professional conduct.
Misrepresent Lex.NY output as your own legal opinion or as advice given by an attorney.
Use the site or its APIs in any way that could disable, overburden, or impair operation, or that interferes with other users.

6. Rate limits

The public API is rate-limited per IP address. The current limits are 10 requests per minute on /api/ask and 5 requests per minute on /api/ask/stream. Exceeding the limits returns an HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header. Higher throughput is available by self-hosting the open source repository.

7. Open source license

The Lex.NY application code is open source under the Apache License 2.0. The repository is at github.com/banksythequantLab/lex-ny. You are free to copy, modify, and self-host the code subject to the license. The underlying legal data (case text from CourtListener, statute text from the New York Senate) is governed by its own publishers’ terms; consult those sites directly for their licensing.

8. No warranty

Lex.NY is provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The operators disclaim all warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, currency, and non-infringement. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the operators are not liable for any claim, damage, or other liability arising from your use of the site or its output.

9. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Any dispute arising from or related to your use of Lex.NY is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in New York, New York.

10. Changes

We may update these terms. The “last updated” date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Continued use after a change constitutes acceptance of the new terms. For version history, consult the public repository.

11. Contact

Questions about these terms or about the operation of Lex.NY can be directed via the contact methods listed at nota.lawyer or by opening an issue on the public repository.