Planning · Legal research
Claw
A search engine over 169,000+ UK planning appeal decisions, with AI-assisted research built for planning professionals.
- appeal decisions indexed
- 169,000+appeal decisions indexed
- to find precedent that took an afternoon
- Secondsto find precedent that took an afternoon
- team members per account
- 5team members per account
The brief
Planning work runs on precedent — what an inspector decided in a comparable case, and the reasoning they used to get there. That evidence sits in tens of thousands of PDF decision letters published by the Planning Inspectorate.
It is all technically public. It is also close to unsearchable: no full-text search worth the name, no filtering that matches how a planner actually thinks about a case, and no way to keep hold of what you found. Assembling three relevant appeals could take most of an afternoon.
What I built
- Full-text search across 169,000+ appeal decisions, with matching passages highlighted in context so relevance can be judged from the results list rather than by opening every document.
- Filtering by decision type, local authority and date range — the axes planners narrow on first.
- Original PDF decision letters rendered in the browser, so the source document is one click away and nothing is lost to a downloads folder.
- Bookmarks and saved libraries, so a piece of research outlives the session it was done in.
- Team accounts for up to five members, sharing one subscription and one library.
- An AI assistant that answers questions against the appeal documents themselves, with connectors so it can be reached from Claude and ChatGPT.
- Subscription billing, account management and the marketing site that sells it.
Where it landed
Claw is live and in daily use by planning consultants, architects, developers and local authority teams.
Named users include PlanIt Consulting, Planning Geek, HC Planning and CBRE, alongside a number of UK councils.
Tell me about your project
A short chat to work out what you need and which package fits. It is free, and there is no obligation at the end of it.
Evening and weekend work · Replies within two working days · Same-day turnaround is not offered