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

Bot Verification Required for Legal Case Access

Favicon for www.bailii.org BAILII Ireland Recent Decisions
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Summary

BAILII Ireland has implemented Anubis, a bot verification system using proof-of-work (Hashcash-style) to protect server resources against automated scraping. Users must solve a JavaScript-based challenge before accessing case documents. The system aims to distinguish legitimate users from AI web crawlers while causing minimal friction for genuine legal research.

What changed

BAILII Ireland has deployed Anubis, a bot verification system that requires users to complete a proof-of-work challenge using JavaScript. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to impose computational costs on mass automated scraping while remaining negligible for individual legitimate users.

Legal researchers and practitioners accessing Irish case law through BAILII will need to ensure JavaScript is enabled and disable plugins that block JavaScript execution. The system is intended as a temporary measure while more sophisticated browser fingerprinting techniques are developed to identify headless browsers used by AI scraping tools.

What to do next

  1. Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter for bailii.org domain

Archived snapshot

Apr 13, 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 Technology companies
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Legal research access Website bot protection
Geographic scope
Ireland IE

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Compliance frameworks
NIST CSF
Topics
Data Privacy Artificial Intelligence

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