Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Challenge for Case Access
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Challenge for Case Access

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Summary

BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work-based bot verification system, to protect its servers against AI web scraping. The system requires modern JavaScript and may block users with anti-tracking extensions such as JShelter. Legitimate users encountering the challenge may experience temporary access delays while completing verification.

Published by BAILII on bailii.org . Detected, standardized, and enriched by GovPing. Review our methodology and editorial standards .

What changed

BAILII has added a bot verification challenge layer using proof-of-work technology. The Anubis system is designed to impose minimal burden on individual users while making large-scale automated scraping economically unfeasible. Users must disable certain browser extensions to access case content.

For legal researchers and practitioners relying on BAILII, this change introduces potential access friction when accessing court decisions. Those using anti-fingerprinting or anti-tracking browser extensions will need to temporarily disable these tools to complete the verification challenge.

Archived snapshot

Apr 18, 2026

GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.

Making sure you're not a bot!

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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.

Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.

Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.

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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.

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Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Instrument
Notice
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Researchers
Industry sector
5411 Legal Services
Activity scope
Web scraping prevention Access control
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy

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