It depends on the jurisdiction. I'm based in France and all cases here are now freely available online to people and agents [1], but it's very recent for lower courts. However, I recently had to work on Texas case law and we had to purchase access to a (very expensive [2]) database since most of it wasn't public.

[1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/

[2] https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/westlaw/plans-and-pricin...