Casebyte API

The Casebyte API gives you programmatic access to the same Hong Kong case-law corpus that powers casebyte.ai — roughly 157,000 judgments from the HKSAR courts, with full text, neutral citations, and case-to-case citation links. Search judgments, follow citation links and read recent Daily summaries through one REST API with API-key authentication.

Quickstart

Get an API key and make your first request in under five minutes.

API reference

Endpoints, parameters, response shapes, and error codes.

Search syntax

Phrases, boolean operators, field scoping, and fuzzy matching.

Identifiers

Case IDs, neutral citations, and action numbers — and when to use each.

Daily summaries

Seven days of case summaries for news and video integrations.

What you can do

Run boolean searches over the full corpus

Search case names and judgment text with phrases, AND/OR/NOT operators, field-scoped queries, and fuzzy matching. Filter by court and date range, paginate with offset/limit.

GET /v1/cases/search?q=%22wednesbury+unreasonable%22&court=HKCFA,HKCA

Retrieve a judgment by any identifier

Look up a case by canonical case ID, neutral citation, or action number. Returns metadata plus the full plain-text judgment.

GET /v1/cases/HKCFA_2023_5
GET /v1/cases/%5B2023%5D%20HKCFA%205
GET /v1/cases/FACV%205%2F2022

Find cases that cite a judgment

Returns later judgments that cite the case, deduplicated and sorted by publication date. Includes both direct case-to-case citations and citations by action number.

GET /v1/cases/HKCFA_2023_5/cited-by

Base URL

https://api.casebyte.ai

All endpoints live under /v1/. The unauthenticated /health endpoint returns { "status": "ok" } and is suitable for uptime checks.

Authentication

Every request to /v1/* must carry a Bearer token:

Authorization: Bearer cb_live_...

API keys are issued from your casebyte.ai dashboard. See Quickstart for the full walkthrough.

Coverage

Field	Value
Jurisdiction	Hong Kong (HKSAR)
Courts	Court of Final Appeal, Court of Appeal, Court of First Instance, District Court, Family Court, Magistrates’ Courts, plus tribunals (Lands, Labour, Small Claims, Obscene Articles, Competition) and the Coroner’s Court
Approximate corpus size	~157,000 judgments
Update cadence	Daily, with new judgments typically available within 24 hours of publication

UK and other Commonwealth jurisdictions are not exposed in v1.

Rate limits

10 requests per minute, per API key. Responses include X-RateLimit-Limit and X-RateLimit-Remaining headers so you can pace yourself; over-limit requests return 429. Full details in Rate limits.

Need more?

If you’re hitting rate limits, need bulk export, or want jurisdictions outside Hong Kong, get in touch at support@casebyte.ai.

Getting started

Concepts

Quickstart

API reference

Search syntax

Identifiers

Daily summaries

What you can do

Base URL

Authentication

Coverage

Rate limits

Need more?

Quickstart

API reference

Search syntax

Identifiers

Daily summaries

​What you can do

​Base URL

​Authentication

​Coverage

​Rate limits

​Need more?

What you can do

Base URL

Authentication

Coverage

Rate limits

Need more?