Law ChatGPT Plugins
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Law ChatGPT plugins were a category of third-party tools that connected ChatGPT to legal codes, case law databases, legislative trackers, and lawyer directories between March 2023 and April 2024. They covered United States federal statutes, state codes such as California, foreign jurisdictions including China, Brazil, and Japan, federal case law, and tools that helped readers locate practising attorneys. The category took shape during the broad rollout that began on May 12, 2023 and disappeared along with the rest of the plugin store on April 9, 2024, when OpenAI shut the platform down in favour of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.[1][2]
This article serves as a historical reference. The plugins listed here are no longer reachable. Some developers later released equivalent tools as Custom GPTs, and FiscalNote kept selling its own enterprise products outside the plugin store after the shutdown.
Third-party plugin directories did not use a single fixed taxonomy. Tools that searched primary law (statutes, codes, case opinions, bills) and tools that connected users to legal services (contracts, lawyer matching, document drafting) were both filed under tags such as Law, Legal, or Legal Consultation. This wiki splits them into two articles: this entry covers the primary-source side of the category, and the companion article on legal chatgpt plugins covers the practitioner-services side.
The two categories overlap in several places. FiscalNote is the clearest example: its plugin surfaces statutes and bills (a law-tool function) but professionals in law firms used it for compliance work (a legal-tool function). LawyerPR and Lawyer Search (CA) appear in both groupings because they help users locate attorneys; they sit more naturally in the legal-services article but are mentioned here for completeness. The full plugin taxonomy is mapped in chatgpt plugin categories.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023, with twelve external partners (Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier) plus a first-party browsing plugin and a code interpreter.[1][3] FiscalNote was the inaugural slate's only legal, political, and regulatory data partner; the company said in its press release that it was the sole provider of that kind of information among the launch partners.[4] No dedicated case-law plugin or single-jurisdiction code lookup was in the launch slate.
The broader law category took shape after OpenAI opened the plugin store to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers on May 12, 2023.[5] Midpage announced its caselaw plugin in June, with multiple sources reporting a June 11, 2023 release date and the plugin appearing in third-party directories from June 20, 2023.[6][7] California Law, US Federal Law, Talk Law Brazil, midpage caselaw, and LawyerPR all appear in catalogues from June 20, 2023, indicating that the category settled into shape during the second half of June.[7][8][9][10][11] LegalQA, focused on Chinese law, joined in late June.[12] Lawyer Search (CA) followed in late July.[13]
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces ChatGPT plugins; FiscalNote is the inaugural legal, political, and regulatory data partner[1][4] |
| May 12, 2023 | Plugin store opens broadly to ChatGPT Plus subscribers[5] |
| May 30, 2023 | Mata v. Avianca sanctions ruling highlights the danger of using vanilla ChatGPT for case research without verified primary sources[14] |
| June 11, 2023 | Midpage announces midpage caselaw[6] |
| June 20, 2023 | California Law, US Federal Law, midpage caselaw, Talk Law Brazil, LawyerPR appear in directories[7][8][9][10][11] |
| June 28, 2023 | LegalQA joins for Chinese law queries[12] |
| July 24, 2023 | Lawyer Search (CA) joins[13] |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces GPTs[15] |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens[16] |
| March 19, 2024 | Plugin store closes; new plugin chats end[2] |
| April 9, 2024 | Remaining plugin conversations end and the platform fully shuts down[2] |
The large language model behind ChatGPT in 2023 (initially GPT-3.5, then GPT-4 for paid users) had three weaknesses for legal work. Its training data ended in 2021, so it could not see newer statutes, regulations, or opinions. It could not cite primary sources reliably; the highly publicised Mata v. Avianca sanctions ruling on May 30, 2023 was the leading example, with attorney Steven Schwartz fined $5,000 after submitting a brief that cited six entirely fabricated cases generated by ChatGPT.[14] And it could not filter results by jurisdiction, court level, or date range.
Law plugins addressed those gaps by reaching out at query time to a primary-source API or a hosted legal database. Typical capabilities included:
A primary-source plugin response normally returned the section number or citation, a direct quotation from the statute or opinion, a summary of how it applied to the question, and a link back to the underlying source. A tracker such as Talk Law Brazil normally returned a bill identifier, a status (in committee, awaiting vote, signed into law), and a description in the local language.
A single ChatGPT session could load up to three plugins at once. That limit shaped how readers chose tools: a US tax question might pair California Law with US Federal Law and a calculator, a litigation researcher might combine midpage caselaw with FiscalNote and a citation formatter. These habits pushed users toward deliberate prompt engineering with explicit instructions to refuse if no source was returned and to cite section numbers verbatim.
The table below lists plugins for which launch information can be confirmed in at least two independent sources. Tools that could not be verified are omitted.
| Plugin | Function | Developer | Verified period |
|---|---|---|---|
| FiscalNote | Real-time legal, political, and regulatory data drawn from the Biden Remarks API, the Roll Call API, and the White House calendar API | FiscalNote Holdings, Inc. | Live from March 23, 2023 (inaugural launch slate)[1][4] |
| midpage caselaw | Search, retrieval, summarisation, and verification across United States case law | Midpage (Otto von Zastrow) | Announced June 11, 2023; catalogued from June 20, 2023[6][7] |
| California Law | Keyword search of the California legal code; returns relevant sections with direct quotations | mswoff19 (independent) | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[8] |
| US Federal Law | Keyword search of the United States federal legal code; returns relevant sections with direct quotations | mswoff19 (independent) | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[9] |
| Talk Law Brazil | Information about laws and bills in progress in the Brazilian Congress; queries in Portuguese | dametodata.com (Leonardo Dameto) | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[10] |
| LegalQA | Multilingual question answering about Chinese law | machinelearning.com contact | Catalogued from June 28, 2023[12] |
FiscalNote was the only legal, political, and regulatory data provider in the inaugural twelve-partner slate that OpenAI unveiled on March 23, 2023.[1][4] The company had been aggregating legislation, regulations, and government filings from federal, state, and local agencies for about a decade. Its plugin exposed three concrete data sources to the model: the Biden Remarks API for spoken or written statements made by President Biden, the Roll Call API for news articles about Congressional people and proceedings (drawn from the CQ Roll Call newsroom that FiscalNote acquired in 2018), and the White House calendar API for the official calendar of the executive branch.[17] The plugin focused on the political and regulatory layer rather than judicial opinions or codified statutes. It shipped alongside a parallel Microsoft Bing collaboration that FiscalNote announced separately.[18]
Midpage, a New York and Berlin startup founded by Otto von Zastrow, launched midpage caselaw in mid-June 2023.[6][19] The plugin was one of the first credible answers to the case-citation hallucination problem that Mata v. Avianca had made famous earlier that month.[14] Rather than relying on the model's training data, midpage caselaw gave ChatGPT a small set of tools that searched, read, and summarised the cases in Midpage's own database of primary law. The plugin detected a legal proposition inside a user prompt, extracted verbatim quotations from cited opinions, and assessed whether each proposition was supported by the underlying text. If no support existed, the plugin reported the absence rather than letting the model guess. This architecture (model navigates, plugin reads) became the template for later legal-research integrations.
California Law and US Federal Law were related plugins from the same independent developer (contact email mswoff19@gmail.com), both hosted on Heroku and filed under the law category from June 20, 2023.[8][9] California Law searched the California legal code in response to plain-language queries and returned direct quotations with a summary of how the cited section applied. Marketing covered tenant rights, criminal procedure, employment law, and tax matters; the manifest carried an explicit disclaimer that nothing in the response constituted legal advice.[20] US Federal Law did the same job for the United States Code, covering constitutional, administrative, criminal, civil rights, intellectual property, environmental, immigration, and tax law. Both tools were free, required no account, and exposed a single search command.
Talk Law Brazil, hosted at talklawbrazil.leonardodameto.repl.co with a Brazilian developer behind the dametodata.com domain, launched in mid-June 2023.[10][21] The plugin offered two endpoints: get_laws_dict returned a dictionary of bills currently in progress in the Brazilian Congress, and get_law_info took a law key and a Portuguese follow-up question and returned detailed text about a specific bill, including its status and legislative history. The plugin let citizens, journalists, researchers, and law students query Brazilian legislative activity in Portuguese. It shipped during a year of heightened interest in AI-and-government overlap inside Brazil; in late November 2023 the Porto Alegre city council passed a municipal water-meter ordinance drafted in fifteen seconds by ChatGPT, learning the source only after the law was already in force.[22]
LegalQA was a multilingual plugin that answered questions about Chinese law. Its single answerInquiry command served students of Chinese law, business owners in mainland China, and anyone curious about how an issue would be treated under Chinese statute or regulation.[12][23] LegalQA arrived during a period when ChatGPT itself was not officially available in mainland China and Chinese authorities were writing the rules that became the August 2023 Generative AI Measures, which made the plugin's disclaimers especially relevant.
No equivalent plugin reached the store for the European Union, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, or other large jurisdictions during the plugin era; primary-source legal lookups in those regions had to wait for the GPT Store and for Custom GPT authors with access to local APIs.
The law category overlapped most heavily with the legal-services category covered in legal chatgpt plugins. LawyerPR (the Japanese attorney-matching plugin), Lawyer Search (CA), and the smaller contract and document tools sit in that companion article. They are noted here only because they shared the law tag in some directories. The category also intersected with finance and government affairs. FiscalNote in particular crossed into finance plugins because regulatory and policy questions about tariffs, sanctions, banking rules, and tax law were of direct interest to corporate finance teams.
OpenAI gave roughly three weeks of notice between the March 19, 2024 freeze on new conversations and the April 9, 2024 shutdown.[2] Discovery had been poor: the plugin store was a flat list with limited search and no ratings. The three-plugins-per-chat limit forced choices between, for example, a state code lookup and a federal code lookup. Plugins required developers to host an external server and an OpenAPI manifest, ruling out smaller law firms and bar-association projects. GPTs, announced at OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023 and surfaced through the GPT Store from January 10, 2024, allowed lighter no-code authoring, kept Actions for full external integrations, and folded into the same chat surface.[15][16]
Law-plugin functionality moved to three kinds of successor. After the GPT Store opened, several developers rebuilt their tools as Custom GPTs: midpage shipped a midpage caselaw GPT, and a long tail of independent state-code and country-code GPTs filled the niche. Native ChatGPT browsing matured through 2023 and 2024 and could read public legal websites directly. Vendor-side enterprise products, with FiscalNote the leading example, continued to sell their data through dedicated dashboards and APIs to corporate, governmental, and law-firm subscribers.
The category never produced a definitive answer to the citation-hallucination problem. Even with primary-source plugins, the model could still misinterpret retrieved text or quote out of context, and reviewers in 2023 routinely warned that no plugin-mediated answer should be filed in court without manual verification.
See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Law