Legal information for everyone — Chicago, Illinois

The System Is Closed.
We're Opening It.

The law is public, but usable access still depends on money, software, and time. Unbarred is building verified legal search for everyone, grounded in official Illinois sources. No legal advice. No outcome promises. Just the law, linked and traceable.

Read the story ↓Launching March 2026

The Problem

Public law still has private access costs.

92%

of low-income Americans' civil legal problems receive inadequate or no legal help.

Legal Services Corporation, 2022

85%

of civil legal problems in California's 2024 study also received no or inadequate legal help.

State Bar of California, 2024

27%

of solo attorneys report access to litigation support software, versus 73% at firms with 100+ lawyers.

ABA Legal Technology Survey, 2024

The access gap impacts both people searching for legal information and lawyers serving under-resourced communities. Verification and source transparency have to be baseline infrastructure.

The Story

Why this exists.

Most people are told the law is public. In practice, the path to usable law is fragmented, expensive, and easy to get wrong.

Core legal texts are public domain, but reliable retrieval, citation validation, and procedural context are often gated behind expensive systems. When people turn to generic AI for help, they frequently receive fluent answers without reliable legal grounding.

In the California 2024 Justice Gap Study, 85% of civil legal problems received no or inadequate legal help. Even among people who did consult a lawyer, 1 in 5 were told their matter was legally valid but not financially viable to pursue.

The mission is straightforward: improve access to legal information with deterministic verification, direct links to official sources, and clear boundaries about what software can and cannot do.

Public access should not depend on private tooling.

What We're Building

Verified legal search, built for public access.

Unbarred is building a legal information experience centered on source traceability. Results are designed to map back to official statutes and court opinions so users can inspect the underlying authority directly.

The same verification discipline also supports attorney workflows. In Clio's 2025 report, up to 74% of hourly legal work is estimated to be automatable with AI. For licensed attorneys, LawEngine applies this stack to drafting, analysis, and citation review.

Sources: Legal Services Corporation 2022 · ABA 2024 TechReport · Clio 2025 Legal Trends Report

Design rule: if a legal claim cannot be traced to source, it does not ship in the output.

Attorney lane — available on LawEngine

LawEngine™

AI litigation tools for licensed attorneys, including brief drafting, case analysis, and citation verification with source-linked outputs.

71,616 legal provisions indexed24,254 citation edges mapped600+ AI citation failure cases studied

LawEngine for Attorneys →

Principles

How we build.

Verification-first: outputs should map to source material that users can inspect.
Public access: legal information should be easier to find, read, and validate.
Transparent boundaries: software can support research, but it does not replace legal counsel.
Compliance-first: not a law firm and no legal advice.

If you care about verified legal information and real access, we should talk.

Partnerships, launch updates, and attorney workflows are all in scope.

Email Stephen LawEngine for Attorneys →

Contact

We'd value the conversation.

Reach out to collaborate, discuss the work, or connect on opportunities.

Prefer direct email? stephen@unbarredlaw.com