Assize Data Ltd was incorporated on 9 October 2026. It is one company with four trading names and one way of working: start from the primary source, say plainly where it runs out, and take care with the people in the record.
Where we are now
The company is set up. Assize Data Ltd is registered in England and Wales (company number 17510115). Our registration with the Information Commissioner’s Office is being processed. Our complaints procedure, security and data handling, data protection and data sources and licensing commitments are published and apply to every trading name.
Our services are available now. Court and tribunal data analysis, legal research datasets and bespoke reporting can be commissioned today.
The first publication is live. The Assize, Assize News’s first title, is a reference work on the regulated legal professions of England and Wales beyond solicitors and barristers: who regulates them, how many there are, what each may lawfully do, and what their registers do and do not show. It carries the line every Assize News publication carries, and publishes its own editorial standards, corrections and complaints procedure alongside ours.
Everything else on this page is in preparation or planned.
The order of work
Autumn 2026
- Company. Complete the ICO registration. Publish the policies that govern how we handle public data, personal data and the use of AI in our work.
- Assize News. The Assize is published. Begin a second publication on the judiciary of England and Wales and the routes people take to the bench, built from open sources.
- Assize Research. First briefings from open justice statistics, with the data and methods published beside them.
- Assize Books. First titles in preparation, built from the same open statistics, and a bookshop on this site.
Early 2027
- Assize News. A publication for people working in and applying to the solicitors’ profession, starting with firms rather than individuals, from the regulator’s open data.
- Assize Careers. Routes into a legal career, with employers mapped from published data so applicants can see who does the work that interests them, and where.
- Assize Research. The first full report.
Mid 2027
- Assize News. Further publications on the other branches of the profession as regulators’ positions on re-use allow.
Later in 2027
- Review. In December 2027 we will publish what we measured over the year and what this roadmap changes as a result.
How we handle registers
Several of our publications are built from the registers that regulators publish. The rules we apply:
- Open data is used and credited. Where a register or a statistical series is published under the Open Government Licence or an equivalent, we use it and acknowledge the source.
- Closed registers are asked first. Where a regulator’s terms do not permit re-use, we write to the regulator before we publish anything derived from its register.
- Regulatory findings are reproduced, never scored. A published disciplinary finding appears as the regulator published it, and is removed when the regulator removes it. Nothing we publish ranks a lawyer or a judge.
- Court judgments are read and cited under the Open Justice Licence. Computational analysis of judgments needs a separate licence from The National Archives, and we get that licence before we do that kind of work.
What we will not do
- Score, rank or predict individuals. No ratings of lawyers or judges, no predictions of outcomes, no “who to pursue”.
- Conduct litigation for anyone. Assize Data Ltd is not a law firm and does not give legal advice.
- Build products on scraped court lists.
- Sell personal data. Information about identifiable people drawn from public records is never licensed to third parties.
- Claim official status. We are not a court, tribunal, regulator or government body, and we are not part of or endorsed by one.
Following progress
This page is the record. Each publication keeps its own corrections log, and our complaints procedure covers all of them. If you run a register or publish data we use, we would rather hear from you before publication than after: use the contact page.