1 Apr 2026 • 3 min read

New Legal Research and Writing Tools

I've been creating some new legal research and writing tools. They're for the nerdy.

Legal writing is not as easily assisted by automatic case citation and referencing styles as it could or should be. CSL files such as oscola.csl in Zotero are nice, but don't support case law or legislation well, because CSL has a ideological commitment to not allowing styles to make formatting conditional on the content of a field. This leave CSL a bit of a non-starter for legal citations, which vary by jurisdiction (see however CSL-M from Frank Bennett's Juris-M, although Juris-M is not keeping up with Zotero's now rapid development).

The most comprehensive automated referencing system for a jurisdiction is probably oscola-biblatex, which implements OSCOLA into the LaTeX document creation system used primarily by mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists. It's great. The numbers of law academics who use it is however negligible because LaTeX, while notoriously powerful, is notoriously difficult to learn and at times head-wrenchingly frustrating to debug.

I've made a few tools that are designed for me, but are available to everyone, and hope to make these things easier.

First, when you make a LaTeX file with oscola-biblatex, the problem can be getting it out of LaTeX into, for example, a docx file, for a publisher. The problem is worsened by the fact that because it is a complex style, oscola-biblatex uses the BibLaTeX engine for citation, not the BibTeX engine, and the BibLaTeX engine is less supported in the few good conversion tools that exist for LaTeX.

I have, however — after somewhat of a trial — created a command line script that does quite a good job of converting a LaTeX document that uses OSCOLA into a Word doc.

Let me know how you get on.

It can be hard also to get cases and statutes into the right format for BibLaTeX.

These look like

@jurisdiction{amtDerTiroler,
	date = {2025-02-27},
	ecli = {EU:C:2025:127},
	institution = {CJEU},
	keywords = {eu},
	number = {C-638/23},
	title = {Amt der Tiroler Landesregierung v Datenschutzbehörde}}

@jurisdiction{andrewPrismallV,
	date = {2024},
	keywords = {gb},
	number = {[2024] EWCA Civ 1516},
	pagination = {[]},
	title = {Andrew Prismall v Google {{UK}} Limited \& Anor}}

@legislation{defamationact13,
	title = {Defamation Act},
	date = {2013},
	entrysubtype = {primary},
	pagination = {section},
	keywords = {en},
}

@legislation{PlatformWorkDirective,
	date = {2024},
	entrysubtype = {eu-directive},
	issue = {2831},
	journaltitle = {OJ},
	keywords = {eu},
	number = {2024/2831},
	pages = {1},
	pagination = {article},
	series = {L},
	shorthand = {Platform Work Directive},
	title = {{Directive (EU) 2024/2831 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2024 on improving working conditions in platform work}},
	type = {directive}}

@jurisdiction{BBW2021,
	date = {2021-05-25},
	institution = {ECtHR (Grand Chamber)},
	keywords = {echr},
	number = {58170/13, 62322/14 and 24960/15},
	title = {{Big Brother Watch and Others v the United Kingdom}}}

If you are trying this, and you use VS Code to write LaTeX with, I have created the CaseCite extension that connects to APIs of EU, ECHR and UK statute and legislation databases and can search and make this data for you.

Finally, I have made pending changes to the OSCOLA CSL and LaTeX packages to update them to the 5th version of OSCOLA released in 2026.

Perhaps these are useful to someone! They are useful to me, in any case

Michael