Certus Law
The practice platform for South African lawyers that refuses to invent authority. Every case looked up before it is written. Every figure computed by code.
A general chatbot will write you a beautiful citation to a judgment that was never handed down. It reads perfectly. It links nowhere.
Courts are already asking where the cases came from. The honest answer has to be: I checked every one.
It abstains
When the law holds nothing, Certus says so and marks the gap. It does not guess a statute, a deadline or a figure to fill the silence.
It verifies
A citation either has a real record behind it or it does not. That check is code, not the model's opinion of itself, and every chip opens the judgment.
It calculates
Deadlines, severance and court days come from Certus Logic, a deterministic engine that gives the same answer every time and cites the section.
Size is easy to advertise. What a practitioner needs is narrower, and harder: to know that every authority in a draft is real, matches the record it came from, and opens in one click.
Certus is built around that test, not around a count. When an authority fails it, you see the failure, and it never reaches the page.
The deck
The whole argument, walked through: why guessing is a liability in practice, how the three layers are built so the system abstains instead, and what that changes on the page.
For heads of argument and founding affidavits, where a wrong authority does real damage. CertusHD plans, grounds, drafts and then verifies, and shows you what it could not stand behind.
The failure is shown, not hidden. That line is the product.
The Legal Butler
Hands-free voice calls, background tasks that keep running if you close the tab, and your approval before anything is sent. A morning brief waits when you sit down.
Matters
Check names before you open a file, run one clock per lawyer, and see billable time per matter in Rand, ready to export.
Your practice, your way
CCMA referrals, business rescue, section 145 reviews, POPIA compliance. Start from the library or save your own as a template.
Tier one
Current consolidated Acts and labour judgments, curated so case law and statute are never confused.
What makes it different
Tier two
All national legislation with its amendments, obligations and penalties, so you can read the law as it stood.
Meet ActIntel
Tier three
SAFLII, the courts and the Gazette are consulted only after the curated sources, and a page counts only if it carries the citation.
Each firm lives in its own encrypted database, locked with a key the platform cannot use alone. Your share of that key is shown once. Every unlock is recorded.
Search runs on our own server, not an outside provider, and every action is written to a tamper-evident log. Built around POPIA from the first line.
If a court, a regulator or an attacker puts pressure on Certus to produce your firm's files, we hand over a locked box. Not out of policy, but because the half of the key we hold opens nothing on its own, and the other half was shown to your firm once and never kept.
Three guarantees
One
Every firm is a separately encrypted database. Its key is derived, never stored whole, and the platform holds only part of it. Your share is displayed once, at setup, and Certus keeps no copy. Without it the file stays shut, for us as much as for anyone else.
Two
Every action is appended to a hash chain, each entry sealing the one before it. Alter or remove a single record and every hash after it breaks. Access is therefore not a promise we make, it is arithmetic your firm can check.
Three
The vectors behind meaning search are computed on the Certus server by an open model. No embedding provider, here or offshore, ever sees a line of your work. Platform telemetry records that something happened, never what it said.
Your firm remains the responsible party under POPIA and can always produce its own records. What changes is that Certus cannot be the route in.
Sign in with a magic link, install it on your phone, and put your firm's own name on it.
